Mobile broadband subscriptions are set to increase at a rate of 1 million a day from 4.39 billion at the end of 2016 to 8.28 billion in 2022, according to the latest mobility report released by Ericsson. In fact, total mobile broadband subscriptions will account for around 92 percent of an estimated 8.98 billion mobile subscriptions by 2022, up from 59 percent of 7.5 billion subscriptions at the end of 2016. As a result, worldwide mobile data traffic will increase to 71 exabytes a month by 2022, up from the current figure of 8.8 exabytes a month, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 42 percent. The traffic is the equivalent of the population of Spain streaming HD video 24 hours per day for a month or a single subscriber streaming HD video continuously for 3.55 million years, said Ericsson.
Other findings set out in the report include the fact that LTE-4G will overtake GSM to become the dominant access technology in 2018, having grown faster than any mobile technology in history. It has taken only five years for LTE to cover 2.5 billion people, compared to eight years for WCDMA/HSPA, or 3G. In the first quarter of this year alone, 250 million new LTE subscriptions were added, said Ericsson, adding that there are currently 591 commercial LTE networks deployed in 189 countries. Some 194 of those have been upgraded to LTE-A networks, of which 5 percent support Cat 11 with a 600Gbps capability and 20 percent (41) support Cat 9 at 450Mbps.
The report adds that by 2022 video is set to account for 75 percent of mobile data traffic, up from 50 percent today. Total mobile traffic per smartphone is forecast to rise from 2.1GB a month in 2016 to 12GB a month by 2022.
