90 percent will have a mobile phone by 2020 – Ericsson
The latest edition of the Ericsson Mobility Report reveals that proliferation of mobile technology continues at a rapid pace - 90 percent of the world’s population over six years old is predicted to have a mobile phone by 2020. Furthermore by 2020 smartphone subscriptions are forecast to top 6.1 billion.
Rima Qureshi, Senior Vice President, Chief Strategy Officer and Head of M&A, Ericsson says, “The falling cost of handsets, coupled with improved usability and increasing network coverage, are factors that are making mobile technology a global phenomenon that will soon be available to the vast majority of the world’s population, regardless of age or location.”
Smartphone growth continues as 65-70 percent of all phones sold in the third quarter of 2014 were smartphones, compared with 55 percent in the same quarter for 2013. Despite this increased rate of sales, which will see the addition of an estimated 800 million new smartphone subscriptions by the end of 2014, the report finds there is still plenty of room for growth in the sector. Smartphones currently account for just 37 percent of all mobile phone subscriptions, meaning that many users have yet to make the switch to the more feature-rich, internet-friendly option.
Video continues to dominate mobile networks: in 4G-dominatednetworks it currently constitutes 45-55 percent of mobile traffic, driven largely by increased usage of video streaming and improvements in the mobile video experience. Devices used to watch video are also evolving. Many have larger screens, enabling higher picture quality for streamed video, which results in video being consumed on all types of devices and in higher quantities, both at home and on the move.
5G is expected to be commercially deployed in 2020, and the technology is predicted to have a faster uptake than 4G LTE, just as 4G had a faster uptake than 3G. The difference here is that, in addition to new radio technologies, 5G will also encompass evolved versions of existing radio access (such as 3G and 4G), cloud, and core technologies to cater for the thousands of new ways that mobile technology will be used. 5G growth will be driven to a large extent by new use cases, especially in machine-type communications.
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