India-based Mobile Subscriptions attain net addition of 10 Million in Q1 2013: Report

Ericsson has published the new edition of Mobility Report to study mobile-data traffic in the coming future, a trend driven mainly by video. The study revealed that overall data traffic is expected to grow 12-fold by the end of 2018. Mobile subscriptions in India saw a net addition of 10 million in Q1 2013.

Douglas Gilstrap, Senior Vice-President & Head of Strategy, Ericsson, said, "LTE services will be available to about 60 per cent of the world’s population in 2018. We expect LTE subscriptions to exceed 1 billion in 2017, driven by more capable devices and demand for data-intensive services such as video. Owing to the build out of WCDMA/HSPA, network speeds have improved, and so has the user experience."

The Mobility Report also addressed the concept of "app coverage" and video streaming. Video makes up the largest segment of data traffic in networks, and it is expected to grow around 60 per cent annually up until the end of 2018. Video consumption is, on average, 2.6GB per subscription per month in some networks. Consumers spend more time on social networking: an average of up to 85 minutes per day in some networks.

Smartphones accounted for around half of all mobile-phone sales in Q1 2013, compared with roughly 40 per cent for the whole of 2012. The number of total mobile subscriptions grew by 8 per cent globally year-on-year by Q1 2013. Mobile-broadband subscriptions grew even faster over this period (at a rate of 45 per cent year-on-year), reaching around 1.7 billion.