It's just a bad article. Mobile phones were almost universal by 2002 in the US. When I was on the job market visiting a university in January 2002, there was someone that still didn't have a cellphone, and it was so rare by that point that it was a topic of discussion. Even in sparsely-populated western North Dakota and South Dakota, most people had a mobile phone by then.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by "had a mobile phone." I had one--probably from sometime in the 90s. But until I got a Treo in 2006, it was something I only used for specific purposes like if I was running an activity and I wanted people to be able to reach me. It wasn't something I carried with me.
(But, certainly, by the early 2000s a fair number of people expected others to be immediately reachable by cell.)
