When tablets and feature phones are included, total mobile subscriptions are growing at around 4% year-on-year, reaching 7.6 billion in the first quarter.
LTE will overtake GSM as the largest subscribed technology on the planet in 2018.
Ericsson foresees continued rapid growth of mobile connectivity as global mobile data traffic increases to eight times its current level by 2022.
Globally Ericsson reported that mobile subscriptions were growing at around four percent year-on-year, reaching 7.6 billion in Q1, but mobile broadband subscriptions are growing much faster, 25 percent year on year to about 4.6 billion now. While more mundane internet use cases, like file sharing and web browsing, are expected to grow by only 19-percent and 22-percent respectively by 2022.
"In Australia LTE subscriptions are now 60% of all mobile subscriptions with a predicted rise to 90% in 2022".
"Based on measurements made in hundreds of mobile networks, the Ericsson Mobility Report data truly illustrates the tremendous underlying growth in the industry", said Niklas Heuveldop, chief strategy officer and head of technology and emerging business, Ericsson. It said that nearly three million new mobile broadband subscriptions were added very day in Q1. "In Australia, there is a high probability (88%) of meeting minimum speeds to meet a time to content target of 3 seconds DL 5Mbps".
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The latest collection of statistics from the report saw the highest year-on-year mobile data growth since 2013, due to the growth of mobile data use in India.
By 2022, it is predicted that the average amount of data being used by a smartphone in the U.S. will be in the region of 26GB per month, according to the latest Ericsson Mobility Report. This, says Ericsson, is the equivalent of the population of Spain streaming HD video 24 hours per day for a month or a single subscriber streaming HD video continuously for 3.55 million years, or 31 billion hours of continuous HD video streaming.
Contributing to those numbers is the high number of mobile subscriptions across Canada and the USA - approximately 380 million today, including 310 million smartphone subscriptions - a number that is expected to grow to 430 million by 2022.
While LTE uptake is driven by demand for improved user experience and faster networks, 5G deployment will also be driven by the need for enhanced mobile broadband capabilities as well as industry solutions for efficiency and automation.
Meanwhile, the report predicts 5G subscriptions will exceed 500 million by the end of 2022, with the technology then covering around 15 percent of the world's population.
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