Ericsson releases second Traffic and Market Report

The number of mobile subscriptions will be close to nine billion by 2017, compared to six billion by the end of 2011. Machine-to-machine subscriptions will add to this figure.

Mobile broadband subscriptions, meanwhile, are forecast to reach five billion in 2017, compared to one billion by the end of 2011.

Douglas Gilstrap, Senior Vice President and Head of Strategy, Ericsson commented: "Today, people see access to the internet as a prerequisite for any device. This mindset results in growing demand for mobile broadband and increased data traffic. Operators recognize this business opportunity and are aiming to facilitate this growth and provide good user experience with fast data speeds through high capacity networks. Today, around 75% of the HSPA networks worldwide have been upgraded to a peak speed of 7.2 Mbps or above and around 40% has been upgraded to 21 Mbps."

In the report, Ericsson also predicts that by 2017, half of the world’s population will be covered by LTE/4G networks. Smartphone subscriptions will number around three billion in 2017 – compared to 700 million in 2011.

Total mobile data traffic continues to increase ; between Q1 2011 and Q1 2012 data traffic doubled. Video captured with smartphones, the report says, is the prime driver. The mobile data traffic is expected to grow by 15 times between 2011 and 2017.

The data in the report also shows variations between countries and regions. In the case of mobile net additions, China added the most subscriptions for a single country in Q1 2012 with 39 million, followed by India with 25 million. The Asia Pacific region added in total 93 million subscriptions, followed by Africa with 30 million.

The main continuous trend identified in the report is that everything is going mobile. This evolution is mainly being driven by people’s increasing demand for anywhere, anytime connectivity and the use of video, cloud-based services and the internet – but also by machine-to-machine connectivity.

Ericsson has performed measurements since the early days of mobile broadband from a large base of live networks covering all regions of the world. The aim of the company’s Traffic and Market Report is to share analysis based on these measurements, internal forecasts and other relevant studies to provide insights into the current traffic and market trends.