In a recent study by Ericsson, the 141-year-old Swedish multinational networking and telecom company projected that one million new mobile broadband subscribers will be added per day, resulting in an additional 2.6 billion subscribers by the end of 2022.
The company’s June 2017 Mobility Report states that alongside that subscriber growth, it foresees global mobile data traffic increasing to eight times its current level in the same time period.
To help with visualizing that number, Ericsson helpfully points out projected increase is the equivalent of a single subscriber streaming HD video continuously for 3.55 million years or 31 billion hours of continuous HD video streaming.
The report also showed how North America’s (NAM) market stacks up to others in the grand scheme of things, comparing it against Latin America (LAM), Asia Pacific (APAC), Central Europe and Middle East Africa (CEMA) and Western Europe (WE).
In data traffic, North America came in just after Latin America (shown above), but when it came to subscribers specifically, the North American market was dwarfed by most other areas — particularly, China, India and other Asian Pacific companies, which have more mobile-driven economies.
Ericsson’s study also found that 107 million new mobile subscriptions had been added globally in the first quarter, reaching a total of 7.6 billion, while LTE subscriptions specifically reached a total of 2.1 billion the first quarter of 2017.
The company also foresees 5G technology accelerating at a rapid pace, predicting that the number of 5G subscriptions will exceed half a billion by the end of 2022, following the first large-scale deployments in 2019.
Source: Ericsson
