Sweden tops the table of states when machine is counted by one -to-machine accounts per 100 mobile connections, with 50 per 100. Next comes New Zealand, Finland and Norway, with France in fifth position.

An amount that is somewhat less vague can be had when one counts the amount of people that can get a mobile phone to work: the ITU reckons 95 per cent of us can get at least one pub of coverage.

The amounts are less impressive when one contemplates web use: 53 per cent of us aren’t on the ‘web. 75 per cent of Africans are not capable to see cat videos on demand are not online and even in Asia 58 per cent of people. That latter figure comes despite China having 230 million homes compared to 60 million in India.

The typical cost of a fundamental fixed-broadband strategy is more than twice as high as the typical cost of a mobile broadband strategy that is similar.” In the least developed countries of the world, frozen services cost three times more than cellular telephone services. No wonder mobile broadband connections are growing rapidly, with the ITU calling 3.6m subscriptions by year’s end, up from 2015’s 3.2m.

As poorer countries lack great links to the external world but if someone in a developing country can get online, they will get a bad connection. The typical African country has only six internet hosts.

The ITU’s take on the amounts it presents is that they represent adequate improvement towards sustainable development targets, but that digital divides continue across sex and economic lines.