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Fewer than 70,000 North Koreans used cell phones two years ago and a year ago the figure stood at about 300,000. One recent study by the Nautilus Institute says 60 percent of Pyeongyang residents aged 20 to 50 use cell phones.

Analysts at the time said that the network posed little of a threat to the regime, mainly because officials had controlled outside information so tightly. Additionally, severe limitations on the internet restrict access to any domain except a handful of historical sites that are accessible to a select few people. However, as the Nautilus Institute’s Alexandre Mansourov said in a report, “The DPRK mobile communications industry has crossed the Rubicon and the North Korean government can no longer roll it back without paying a severe political price.”

Kim Jong-Il’s two other sons are conspicuous by their absence. They are not listed as members of the official funeral committee and have not been pictured during the mourning period. ”Omitting the other offspring provides a straight and clean succession path from Kim Jong-Il to Kim Jong-Un,” wrote Roger Cavazos, an associate of the Nautilus Institute think-tank.

The Egyptian firm Orascom Telecom Holding SAE (OCIC) is building a 3G cell network in the North, according to a Nov. 1 report by Alexandre Mansourov of the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability, a policy research group in San Francisco. The report said that only about 3 percent of the country now has service, although it would become harder to monitor as it grows.

The best estimates on the extent of that darkness today come from the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability, which has worked for years on the energy situation in North Korea.  The latest figures, which soon will be published as an update to a study Nautilus did in 2007 (pdf), show that North Korea currently is consuming about 10.4 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, says Nautilus senior associate David von Hippel.  That’s less than the electricity used each year by the city of Washington, D.C.  (about 12 billion kilowatt-hours) spread thinly across a country that has almost 40 times as many people as the U.S. capital.

The Nautilus Institute — a research center with offices in San Francisco, Seoul and Melbourne, Australia — issued a statement Monday saying Kim Jong Un is “likely to be more open to rapid, structural change in the economy. Whether he can bring along his senior advisers in embracing the notion of structural change is another matter.”

Bush and others like Peter Hayes who have worked with the Nautilus Institute to implement creative development programs on the ground in North Korea believe there is always the chance that a regime change could gradually lead to warmer relations with the isolated country.

Kim Jong Un reportedly attended school in Switzerland for a time during his early teens and is said to have both English and German language skills.

“He is a cosmopolitan young man. He could surprise us,” Hayes says. “I think it’s unlikely that North Korea engages fully with the West, but it’s low-lying fruit waiting to be plucked by a new administration.”

In the last couple of years, mobile phone use has “just exploded,” he said, with people often using mid-range, China-made handsets to trade SMS messages, play games and browse weather reports.

The North’s mobile communications industry “has crossed the Rubicon, and the government can no longer roll it back without paying a severe political price,” the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability said in a report last month.

North Korea will soon boast one million cell phone users, just four years after people were imprisoned for possessing handsets, illustrating mobile technology’s effect on the isolated, authoritarian country. The Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability reports 60 percent of people aged 20 to 50 own mobile phones in the capital of Pyongyang, where the country’s most affluent citizens reside.

A report this month by the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability said 60 percent of people ages 20 to 50 use cellphones in Pyongyang, a city of around 3 million people who are strictly vetted by the state for residency permits. ”Especially for the younger generation in their 20s and 30s, as well as the merchant community, a cellphone is seen as a must, and many youngsters can no longer see their lives without it,” Alexandre Mansourov wrote in the report.