The data traffic per smartphone user in India will increase to 11 GB per month by 2022, from 2GB per month data consumption currently, according to Ericsson Mobility Report 2017.
The total mobile data traffic in India is expected to grow at a CAGR of around 40 percent, reaching almost 8 Exabytes of data per month compared to around 1 EB of data consumption by the end of 2016. The findings said that this massive growth in data traffic is fueled by fast-paced smartphone adoption, changing user behaviour and disruptive pricing strategies of operators.
“Increased distribution and consumption of video and multimedia services, as well as the growth in mobile banking transactions and digital payments, are also fueling the data traffic in the country. By the Year 2022 97 percent of mobile data traffic will be smartphone traffic,” the telecom gear maker said in a statement.
Ericsson said that data is increasingly generating far more traffic than voice calls, while the interest in video streaming continues to grow. Ericsson stated that smartphone subscriptions in India are expected to represent 30 percent of all mobile subscriptions in 2017, which is projected to reach over 60 percent by 2022 By this time, smartphone subscriptions are set to reach 890 million.
India’s mobile subscription base crossed 1.2 billion mark in January 2017. Total mobile subscriptions are estimated to increase by 4 percent per year, exceeding 1.4 Billion in 2022, Ericsson said.
Consumers 4G usage behaviour is skewed towards data-centric services .4G users are nearly 1.5 times more satisfied than 3G users in India, according to the findings. The report added that VoLTE subscriptions are projected to reach 4.6 billion by the end of 2022. By this time, the VoLTE subscriber base in India is pegged at 370 million.
“VoLTE represents a great opportunity for telecom operators in India who are looking to route voice calls over 4G LTE networks enabling lower cost per minute for voice calls as well as free up legacy spectrum bands for re-farming,” Nitin Bansal, Head of Network Products, Ericsson India said.
Ericsson said that the introduction of VoLTE would unleash a superior experience for users by enabling high-quality voice and video calling as well as other rich communication services from their device’s native dialer with no need of additional applications.
GSM remained the dominant technology in 2016, accounting for over 70 percent of total mobile subscriptions. LTE and 3G technologies are together expected to represent 85 percent of all Indian subscriptions by 2022, while 5G subscriptions are forecast to become available only in 2022, representing 0.2 percent of total mobile subscriptions reaching 3 million.
As of 2016, there was 23 million cellular IoT connections; by 2022 this is estimated to reach 191 million. Driving this growth is the government’s Digital India vision; its focus on Smart Cities and villages, new use cases for IoT, and the launch of 5G, Ericsson said.
