India to have 500 mn additional smartphone users by 2025, 5G subscriptions to top 2.6 bn globally: Ericsson

India will have an additional 500 million users by 2025, helping the total traffic to triple to 22EB per month in 2025, projects the November 2019 edition of the Ericson Mobility Report. While the country is expected to see the arrival of 5G in 2022, the report expects these subscriptions to top 2.6 billion within the next six years, driven by sustained momentum and a rapidly developing 5G ecosystem. The report also projects that 5G will cover up to 65 percent of the global population by the end of 2025, and handle 45 percent of global mobile data traffic. The report said that smartphone traffic in India is expected to grow because of two factors - high growth in the number of smartphone users and an increase in average usage per smartphone.

Despite the continuous push for 5G, LTE is expected to dominate the Indian market with about 80 percent of mobile subscriptions by the end of 2025. The report expects LTE subscriptions are forecast to increase by 150 million during 2019 and pass GSM/EDGE as the dominant technology. It adds that mobile broadband technologies will account for 57 percent of mobile subscriptions at the end of the year, and the share of smartphone subscriptions is expected to have increased from 48 percent to 54 percent. 5G subscriptions are expected to become available in 2022 and will represent 11 percent of mobile subscriptions at the end of 2025.

"Modernizing existing networks, improving network performance and increasing user experience continue to be at the core of every service provider’s day-to-day business, both in India as well as globally", said Nitin Bansal, Head of Network Solutions for the Market Area South east Asia, Oceania and India.

He added that average monthly mobile data usage per smartphone has seen an extraordinary increase in India in recent years to become the highest in the world. Bansal said that low prices for mobile broadband services, affordable smartphones and people’s changing video viewing habits have continued to drive monthly usage growth in the region.

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The report expects the average monthly data-traffic-per-smartphone to increase from the current figure of 7.2 GB to 24 GB by the end of 2025, in part driven by new consumer behavior, such as Virtual Reality (VR) streaming. With 7.2 GB per month, one can stream 21 minutes of HD video (1280 x 720) daily, while 24 GB would allow streaming 30 minutes of HD video with an additional six minutes of VR each day.

Several leading communications service providers in Asia, Australia, Europe, Middle East, and North America have switched to 5G in 2019 while India is yet to get the service.

"It is encouraging to see that 5G now has broad support from almost all device makers. In 2020, 5G-compatible devices will enter the volume market, which will scale up 5G adoption. The question is no longer if, but how quickly we can convert use cases into relevant applications for consumers and enterprises. With 4G remaining a strong connectivity enabler in many parts of the world, modernizing networks is also key to this technological change we’re going through," Fredrik Jejdling, Executive Vice President and Head of Networks, Ericsson, said.

The forecasts of the report include: total number of cellular IoT connections now seen at five billion by the end of 2025 from 1.3 billion by end 2019 – a compound annual growth rate of 25 percent. NB-IoT and Cat-M technologies are estimated to account for 52 percent of these cellular IoT connections in 2025.