Even in mid-late nineties I would have never paid for a cell phone personally (too expensive), but they were becoming cheap enough that it was common for employers to see the value in making sure you had one.
Most kids had cell phones in mid late nineties where I lived, the phones themselves were cheap but using them were not very cheap, but giving a kid a phone so you could call them if the parent needed seemed popular.
According to [1] (which might be incomplete, IDK) cell phone sales went from 100 million per year in 1997 to 400 million per year in 2000. Subsequently, sales rose to 1.5 billion per year.
So when talking about how many people have cell phones, the difference between "mid 90s" and "late 90s" makes a big difference :)
Indeed, in Norway for example, the tipping point was ~1995: Suddenly the competition had heated up enough that there were "free" phones with contract, and "everyone" got one - in absolute numbers they were still not everywhere, but the rate of increase was dramatic, and you'd go from not knowing anyone with a cellphone (me in '94 - literally zero people) to a large number having one by the summer of '95.
Other countries will have different specific times when this happened, but my impression is that cell phones largely took off in a lot of countries in the same way, because competition and high prices for spectrum meant the large telcos suddenly had a reason to poor vast amounts of cash into pushing cellphones almost "overnight", and suddenly even if you didn't have one yourself you'd at least know enough people that it wasn't anything unusual any more.
I'm 48. While I've seen many technical changes, and been part of e.g. driving internet adoption (the company I worked at in '95 was an internet service provide I co-founded, and triggered a price war on internet access in Norway with, that we soundly lost but at least it helped significantly change the market), but none of those changes - including the internet adoption - had such extremely rapid, very visible, effect on society in such a short period of time
(I think pervasive internet access has probably made a bigger difference in the long run, but of course part of that was also enabled by cellphones, but it took longer for it to shape things as visibly)
I had cell phones from sometime in the probably late 90s but they were only used for specific purposes like if I were meeting up with someone and I wanted them to be able to reach me. I didn't really start using cell phones until I got a Treo in 2006 and then an iPhone maybe a few years later.
1) Kids? You mean only high schoolers, right? I lived that time period and can't imagine any kid who didn't drive having a cell phone, then.
2) I graduated in the early '00s and I think maybe 5% of the kids in my graduating class, at most, had a cell phone by graduation. Mostly some shitty Nokia with a phone-only or low-texting plan (texting was still crazy-expensive), mainly for contacting parents about after school activity stuff.
Middle-class-spectrum car-dependent exurb. Maybe it was different for, like, kids growing up in Brooklyn or something? Or rich kids, perhaps.
A more-common perk for children of free-spending parents, in my town, was still a second POTS line, though I do think that was starting to tip the other way just at the end.
Where I lived in Sweden, 1998-1999 was when the breakthrough started with prepaid SIM cards with subsidized phones. In my graduating middle school class there were maybe 3-4 kids with mobile phones (none of us were rich at all, just middle class, and all too young to drive), but in the following 3 years in highschool that went up to basically 100%.
The US was far behind on mobile phones for a long time.
There was maybe a 5-10 year period when personal cell phones were something you had for emergencies or when you were meeting up with people but didn't casually use for extended conversations much less to replace a landline.
You know I kind of forgot the dynamics of that as a 90s kid, compared to 13 year olds with iphones now. Imagine how much TikTok kids would watch if they were charged 10 cents per video.
