Global telecom industry will be adding over one million new mobile Internet users per day, said the latest edition of the Ericsson Mobility Report.
As many as 2.6 billion new mobile broadband subscribers will be added through 2022. Dominant access technology will be LTE 4G in 2018.
Total traffic in mobile networks grew 70 percent between end of Q1 2016 and end of Q1 2017, said Ericsson.
Total smartphone mobile data traffic will have increased 9x, reaching 66 ExaBytes per month, by the end of 2022.
4G subscriptions are increasing faster than ever. Voice over LTE (VoLTE) uptake is accelerating and traffic growth has reached levels the industry has not seen since 2013.
There will be more than half a billion 5G subscriptions (not including IoT connections). 5G population coverage will be 15 percent by 2022. 5G deployment will be driven by the need for enhanced mobile broadband capabilities as well as industry solutions for efficiency and automation.
In 2018, LTE 4G will overtake GSM as the largest access technology by number of subscriptions. LTE took 5 years to cover 2.5 billion people, compared to 8 years for WCDMA/HSPA, or 3G. In the first quarter of 2017, telecoms added 250 million new LTE subscriptions, said Ericsson.
Cisco Visual Networking Index
Cisco — in its Visual Networking Index (VNI) — said Internet users will grow from 3.3 billion to 4.6 billion or 58 percent of the global population.
Personal devices and machine-to-machine (M2M) connections will grow from 17.1 billion to 27.1 billion from 2016 – 2021.
Average broadband speed will increase from 27.5 Mbps to 53 Mbps.
Video viewing will grow from 73 percent to 82 percent of total IP traffic. Over the forecast period, global IP traffic is expected to increase three-fold reaching an annual run rate of 3.3 zettabytes by 2021, up from an annual run rate of 1.2 zettabytes in 2016.
M2M connections that support Internet of Things (IoT) applications will be more than half of the total 27.1 billion devices and connections and will account for five percent of global IP traffic by 2021.
There will be nearly 1.9 billion Internet video users (excluding mobile-only) by 2021, up from 1.4 billion in 2016. The world will reach three trillion Internet video minutes per month by 2021, which is five million years of video per month, or about one million video minutes every second.
