The Ericsson report is silent about the growth of 4G subscriber base in India, which is home to telecom operators such as Airtel, Reliance Jio, Vodafone, Idea Cellular, among others.
Ericsson’s Mobility Report for India said mobile data traffic will grow at a CAGR of around 40 percent, reaching almost 8 EB of data per month, compared to 1EB data consumption in 2016.
LTE and WCDMA/HSPA technologies are together expected to represent 85 percent of all Indian subscriptions by 2022.
Ericsson Mobility Report 2017 said the data traffic per smartphone user in India will grow to 11 GB per month by 2022. By 2022, 97 percent of mobile data traffic will be smartphone traffic .
4G users are nearly 1.5 times more satisfied than 3G users in India.
For 40 percent of 4G users, video loading and video buffering while streaming is the main index by which they judge network performance.
For almost half of 3G users, the time taken to load a web page is the prime indicator of a positive experience.
GSM is the dominant technology in 2016, accounting for 70 percent of total mobile subscriptions. LTE and WCDMA/HSPA technologies are together expected to represent 85 percent of all Indian subscriptions by 2022.
5G subscriptions are forecast to become available in 2022, representing 0.2 percent of total mobile subscriptions reaching 3 million.
As of 2016, there were 23 million cellular IoT connections; by 2022 this is estimated to reach 191 million. Driving this growth is the government’s Digital India vision; its focus on Smart Cities and villages, new use cases for IoT, and the launch of 5G.
In 2017, smartphone subscriptions in India are expected to represent 30 percent of mobile subscriptions. By 2022, this number is expected to reach over 60 percent. By this time, smartphone subscriptions are set to reach 890 million.
Globally, VoLTE subscriptions are projected to reach 4.6 billion in 2022. VoLTE subscriber base in India will be 370 million.
“VoLTE represents a great opportunity for telecom operators in India who are looking to route voice calls over 4G LTE networks enabling lower cost per minute for voice calls as well as free up legacy spectrum bands for re-farming,” said Nitin Bansal, head of Network Products, Ericsson India.
Earlier, Cisco in its Visual Networking Index (VNI) report said that digital transformation will drive IP traffic in India with the projected increase in Internet users from 373 million in 2016 to 829 million or 59 percent of the Indian population in 2021.