The Mobility report has been released by Ericsson recently and it has revealed out some interesting observations as well as predictions about 4G LTE that has been made by the company. According to the report, there will be an increase of about 5% in the worldwide mobile subscriptions during the period of 2014-2020.
On the other hand, they indicated that the total number of mobile devices was around 7.1 billion in 2014, and this number will increase to 9.2 billion as per the company. The report suggested that there would be a decrease in the GSM/EDGE-only subscriptions from current number at 4 billion to 1.4 billion.
This is nearly 15% drop in the numbers. On the other side, the report highlighted that there will an unbelievable 40% growth in the mobile LTE subscriptions. As if now; there are about 500 million subscribers worldwide, but this number will go up to 3.7 billion by 2020 end.
Report also indicated that the monthly data traffic will increase significantly to 30.5 EB from the current value at 3.3 EB/month. This again shows a growth of 46%. The report also highlighted that more number of Indians have starting spending over 3 hours every day on their smartphones.
This is similar to the data that was published last year but it indicated a rise in the data consumption rate per user. Some of the key forecasts and trends pertaining to Indian sector have been highlighted in the appendix of the Ericsson Mobility Report. This has given data about the subscriptions, mobile traffic, technology uptake as well as the consumer behaviour in the country.
The report highlighted that the GSM/Edge subscriber base will be peaking in the year 2015 and most probably down a decline in the subscriptions due to the migration of the customers towards the 3G services.
The report stated that GSM/Edge technology will have the widest reach in India wherein it will cover nearly 95% o the population while WCDMA/HSPA will be covering over 90% of the population by the end of 2020. Apart from this around 40% of the Indian population will also be covered by LTE networks by end of 2020. Affordability of the mobile broadband in Indian market will be drive by the affordability of the smartphones. The total number of subscriptions of the Smartphone is expected to touch 750 million by 2020. This same was reported around 130 million in 2014. Data usage will increase due to growth in the Smartphone subscriptions. Report indicated that monthly mobile data consumption will increase 18 times by the end of 2020 when compared to the current levels. When it comes to Indians, most of the mobile data is used for video streaming and then comes the social networking. What interesting is the fact that the ratio of people using smartphones and belonging to 50 years age has quadrupled between the years 2013-2015. During the same time, the ratio of people falling between 31-40 years started using mobile data, 3 times more than before.