In 2022 there will be 550 million 5G subscriptions worldwide

In 2022 there will be 550 million 5G subscriptions worldwide, according to the latest Ericsson Mobility Report. 5G will account for a quarter of all subscriptions there.

The latest Mobility Report of Ericsson It anticipates that in 2022 there will be 550 million 5G subscriptions worldwide. North America will have the largest market share in the world for this technology: 5G will account for a quarter of all subscriptions there.

The Asia-Pacific region will be the second fastest growing 5G subscriptions, at 10% within six years. The Middle East and Africa will go from being regions with the majority of GSM/EDGE subscriptions in 2016 until in 2022, 80% of the total will be WCDME/HSPA and LTE.

By the end of 2016 there will be almost 4 billion smartphone subscriptions in the world, 90% corresponding to WCDMA/HSPA and LTE subscriptions. By 2022, the number of smartphone subscriptions is expected to reach 6.8 billion, of which more than 95% will be WCDMA/HSPA, LTE and 5G.

Ulf Ewaldsson, Chief Strategy and Technology Officer at Ericsson, states that "almost 90% of smartphone subscriptions are currently on 3G and 4G networks, and standardized 5G networks are expected to be available in 2020. We are already seeing great interest among operators in launching pre-standard 5G networks. 5G will accelerate digital transformation in many industries and enable new use cases in areas such as the Internet of Things, automation, transportation and big data”.

The latest Ericsson Mobility Report also predicts that in 2022 there will be 8,900 mobile subscriptions, 90% in mobile broadband. At that time it is expected that there will be 6.1 billion unique mobile broadband subscribers.

In the third quarter of 2016, 84 million new mobile subscriptions were registered, reaching 7.5 billion, a growth of 3% year after year. India was the country that grew the most, with 15 million in that period, followed by China (14 million), Indonesia (6 million), Myanmar (4 million) and the Philippines (4 million).

Mobile broadband subscriptions are increasing by 25% every year. Only in the third quarter of this year they have grown by about 190 million and the figure now exceeds 4,000 million worldwide.

Mobile data traffic continues to grow, driven by the increase in smartphone subscriptions and the constant increase in the average volume of data per subscription, especially video content. Through September, data traffic was up 10% quarterly and 50% year-on-year.

mobile video

On the other hand, the Ericsson Mobility Report predicts that mobile video traffic will grow by 50% annually until 2022, when it will account for almost 75% of all data traffic. Social networks represent the second largest chapter in terms of data traffic, and are expected to grow 39% annually in the next six years.

Along these lines, consumers are increasingly using streaming video applications to interact with friends, family and followers. Facebook, YouTube and WhatsApp are the social networks most frequented by Spaniards (a ranking identical to that of Germany), followed by Instagram and Twitter.

Regarding the impact of the Internet of Things, by 2022 it is expected that there will be around 29,000 connected devices, 18 billion of them related to IoT. The latest Mobility Report delves further into the IoT and its transformative potential. The report includes two articles written with operators who have built IoT solutions on top of their core assets, creating additional business value. Another article explores the possibilities of mobile networks to support a realistic scenario of massive IoT use cases.