Ericsson’s latest Mobility Report makes some interesting predictions about the pace of 5G adoption globally.
The Swedish telecoms vendor expects global 5G subscriptions will exceed 2.6 billion within the next six years. By this time, Ericsson predicts 5G will cover 65 percent of the world.
Ericsson believes total mobile subscriptions, including to previous generation networks, will reach 8.9 billion from 8 billion over the next six years.
The current average monthly data-traffic-per-smartphone is forecast to increase from around 7.2GB today to a whopping 24GB in the same timeframe. Such a large jump will be driven, in part, by new consumer behaviours like VR streaming.
While it’s not specifically mentioned by Ericsson, game streaming will be another consumer behaviour that will substantially increase data consumption. Just yesterday, a Reddit user posted s/he consumed 42GB of data in a month using Microsoft’s xCloud streaming. Scrolling through the comments, some other users report using almost 100GB.
Over a quarter of the global subscriptions will be 5G by 2025 and will account for around 45 percent of worldwide mobile data traffic.
Fredrik Jejdling, Executive Vice President and Head of Networks, Ericsson, says:
“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, modernising networks is also key to this technological change we’re going through.”
Operators in Asia, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and North America began switching on their 5G networks in 2019.
Ericsson highlights that adoption of 5G in South Korea has been particularly fast since launching networks in April. More than three million 5G subscriptions were recorded by the end of September.
Faster-than-expected adoption of 5G in China has caused Ericsson to update its estimate for the end of 2019 from 10 million to 13 million.
Based on its current momentum, Ericsson expects 5G uptake will be significantly faster than that of LTE. North America is expected to lead adoption with 74 percent of subscriptions to be 5G by the end of 2025, followed by North-East Asia at 56 percent, and Europe at 55 percent.
You can find the full Ericsson Mobility Report November 2019 here.
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