India leads the world in the addition of new mobile subscriptions. While 102 million subscriptions were added globally in the first three months of 2017, India contributed the largest chunk—43 million. China is a distant second with 24 million.
This growth in subscriptions means almost 88 per cent of Indians have a mobile device. In fact, on a global plane, the number of mobile phones exceeds the population in many geographies.
And it is not just about voice. Growth in data traffic is massive in India and is expected to grow at around 40 per cent annually to reach 8 exabytes of data by 2022, with every smartphone user consuming 11 GB per month, compared to just one exabyte last year.( One exabyte is one billion gigabytes or 10 raised to the power 18 bytes.)
These are some of the India-specific findings of the Ericsson Mobility Report 2017, released last week. Headquartered in Stockholm, Ericsson is a world leader in communications technology and services, with significant user base in India.
Video drives data usage
Indians consume a lot of video and multimedia, and this coupled with the post-demonetisation spurt in mobile banking and digital payments are the main reasons for the growth in data consumption. The ability to watch live broadcasts of user-generated and professional content on existing apps has also increased the appeal of live streaming.
The spread of 4G is making it easier and faster to upload pictures on social media, open a web page, buffer a video or download email attachments. 4G users are nearly 1.5 times more satisfied than 3G users in India, the report states.
Says Nitin Bansal, Head of Network Products, Ericsson India: “As new apps continue to emerge and usage behaviour evolves, network performance will play an even bigger role in determining smartphone users’ loyalty towards their operators. In fact, mobile broadband experience in India is five times more effective in driving loyalty than tariff structure and pricing.” In other words, Indian consumers are ready to pay a bit more for quality service.
GSM remained the dominant technology in 2016, accounting for over 70 per cent of total mobile subscriptions. LTE and WCDMA/HSPA (both 4G) technologies are together expected to represent 85 per cent of all Indian subscriptions by 2022. For 5G we have to wait for another five years; the thrust towards smart cities and Digital India is driving the growth to 5G.
Today, smartphone subscriptions in India represent 30 per cent of all mobile subscriptions. By 2022 , this number is expected to reach over 60 per cent. 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 four per cent per year , exceeding 1.4 billion in 2022.
VoLTE will grow
VoLTE or Voice over LTE is seen to grow from 370 million today to 4.6 billion by 2022. VoLTE is expected to provide 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.
“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," adds Bansal.
