ORLANDO, Fla. — Ericsson AG is not relenting on its vision for 50 billion connected devices by 2020.
“We call that the networked society, the next phase,” president and CEO Hans Vestberg said in his keynote this morning.
“Anything that benefits from being connected will be connected,” he said.
Beyond the changes that this vision will bring to peoples’ personal lives, it will continue to have impacts on society as a whole. “We’re also going to transform businesses and institutions and even society,” Vestberg said.
He laid out three forces that are central to this transition to the networked society: coverage, mobile broadband and the cloud. To that end, Vestberg expects coverage to reach 90% of earth within the next five years and mobile broadband is expected to reach more than 1 billion users by the end of the year.
There are two key points that drive home the impact this transition will have on society. For every 1,000 broadband connections, 80 new jobs are created and every 10% of broadband penetration in a given country results in a stable 1% of gross domestic product.
Given that, “it’s not strange that many governments … see broadband as one of the pillars” of infrastructure and economic growth.