Average calls

[Steve B]

does anyone know:
a) how many telephones there are on average in the UK
and
b) on average how many are busy at any given time?

cheers

[MadduckUK]

yes!

no

[fatbears]

Mobiles or Landlines?

[Stringent]

Well BT give away free calls at the weekends. Guess when people don't use the phone most.

[coco]

33.602 million landline phones
and 69.657 million mobilephones according to the CIA

er how many busy ....


the answer is 42

[Whiternoise]

a) If the UK population is 60 million, and we may assume each household has roughly 3 people in it, then we get about 20 million, but of course we could guess at 10 million phones in businesses as well.

The number of mobiles is harder to guess at - i mean it's reasonable to assume that as the majority of the population have a mobile phone each and some people have more than one, that the total number is likely to be just over the actual population count. And again, some mobiles are businesses only, some are inactive, etc. Is the CIA data based on the amount of unique numbers processed by carriers?

b) Time is the key here, it is obviuosly more likely that a phone will be busy at night, when people are back from work. More phones are probably busy around rush hour when people are calling home to tell people that they're going to be late back from work, etc. You could probably do it by probability, but i would imagine that it's about 20%.