People can't leave home without their cellphones

The survey, conducted by market research firm IDC and sponsored by Nortel Networks Corp, found that while more than 38 percent of the 2,367 people polled chose their mobile phones, less than 30 percent chose their wallets first.

Through the survey, Nortel -- North America's biggest maker of telephone gear -- was looking to find out how many workers around the world can be defined as "hyperconnected," or as those who have fully embraced multiple devices like cellphones and laptops, as well as applications like e-mail or social networking sites like Facebook.

The answer: 16 percent, and growing.

The survey classified the hyperconnected worker as someone who uses at least seven devices for work and personal access, in addition to at least nine applications like instant messaging, text messaging or web conferencing.

The country with the highest percentage of hyperconnected respondents in the study was China. Canada and the United Arab Emirates had the fewest number among the 17 countries covered in the survey.

The survey also predicts the number of the hyperconnected will likely rise to 40 percent in five years. That could bode well for Toronto-based Nortel, which has bet heavily on the hope that as bandwidth and network demand soar with more devices connecting to the Internet, so too will demand for the network technologies it makes.

The group of hard-core communications users is followed by a larger subset -- 36 percent of respondents -- designated as "increasingly connected," the study states.