With an average of one million new subscriptions per day on mobile networks, mobile data traffic increased 70% between the first quarter of 2016 and the first quarter of 2017, according to the latest Ericsson Mobility Report. The firm said much of this increase was due to Reliance Jio’s free data offer in India. India is the world’s second biggest mobile market after China.
The report also predicts that worldwide smartphone subscriptions will almost double during the next six years, growing from 3.9 billion in 2016 to 6.8 billion by 2022. When tablets and feature phones are included, total mobile subscriptions are growing at around 4% year-on-year, reaching 7.6 billion in the first quarter. Again, India is in the lead, with 43 million net additions during the quarter.
Even without India and China, the Asia Pacific region boasts the largest number of mobile subscriptions. Ericsson estimates 1.5 billion mobile subscriptions in the APAC region, exclusive of China and India. That’s more than the number of subscriptions in North America, Western Europe and Latin America, combined. Meanwhile China has 1.3 billion subscriptions and India has 1.1 billion.
“The number of mobile subscriptions exceeds the population in many countries, which is largely due to inactive subscriptions, multiple device ownership or optimization of subscriptions for different types of calls,” said Ericsson. “As a result, the number of subscribers is lower than the number of subscriptions. Today, there are around 5.2 billion subscribers globally compared to 7.6 billion subscriptions.” China, India and Africa are the only areas in which the number of potential subscribers is higher than the number of subscriptions.
The Ericsson Mobility Report confirms what most operators already know from observation: video is now the dominant form of network traffic. Ericsson projects that by 2022, video will account for three quarters of network traffic.
“Mobile video traffic is forecast to grow by around 50% annually through 2022 to account for nearly 3 quarters of all mobile data traffic,” according to the report. “Social networking is expected to grow by 38%annually over the next 6 years. However, its relative share of traffic will decline from 13% in 2016 to around 11% in 2022, as a result of the stronger growth in video.”
