As per the Ericsson Mobility Report, the mobile subscription has grown by 7% year-over-year, with 120 million net additions in Q1 alone. The report also reveals that the number of active cellular M2M devices will increase 3-4 times by 2019, from 200 million at the end of 2013. While the majority of cellular M2M devices today are still GSM-only, that is expected to shift by 2016 when 3G/4G will represent the majority of active cellular M2M subscriptions.
Rima Qureshi, Senior Vice-President & Ericsson’s Chief Strategy Officer, says, “We see cellular M2M taking off. Over time, cellular M2M services and applications related to, for example, intelligent transport systems, will require very short latency in order to be efficient. By 2019, we estimate that more than 20 per cent of the active cellular M2M devices will be connected to LTE subscriptions. We also see new device-to-device and M2M applications as a key focus of 5G networks.”
Next year, the total number of mobile subscriptions will exceed the world’s population. India leads the “Top 5” countries by net additions in Q1 2014. The top five countries by net additions accounted for more than 50% of new mobile subscriptions in Q1 2014. Mobile broadband subscriptions also continue to grow and will reach 7.6 billion by the end of 2019, representing more than 80 per cent of the total mobile subscriptions.
In two years’ time, in 2016, the number of smartphone subscriptions will exceed those for basic phones and by 2019 the number of smartphone subscriptions is expected to reach 5.6 billion.
65 per cent of all the phones sold in Q1 2014 were smartphones. Compared to today, a smartphone user in 2019 is expected to consume almost four times the amount of mobile data per month. This contributes to the 10-fold growth prediction in mobile data traffic between 2013 and 2019.
Population coverage for LTE in North East Asia is expected to be 95 per cent by 2019, with LTE penetration levels at 45%.
