Ericsson Sees Huge Growth Continuing in Mobile Market

Perhaps this won’t be a surprise to anyone at all, but Ericsson says that it has done some recent studies which have made the company extremely optimistic about the future of the wireless market. Considering the sheer popularity of phones like the iPhone and the continued improvements to Android based phones, it is a safe bet that several other industry analysts believe the wireless network will have an equally sunny outlook over the next few years.

Ericsson says that the mobile market will be driven in the long run by the same devices that are driving the market now. Cheaper smartphones and mobile devices like the iPad and the Kindle Fire have made the mobile market one of the fastest growing of any consumer tech sector. One of the key aspects of the mobile market is that smartphones have been taking over the cell phone market, with the company saying that their studies show that 40 percent of all cell phones sold in the first quarter of this year were smartphones. 

The Android platform has definitely contributed to this development, as it has helped to bring down the prices of smartphones and made the devices more widely available," said Johan Wibergh, who heads Ericsson's network business unit.

Ericsson said that the more people who use mobile devices to access the Internet, the bigger the mobile device market will grow. The company said that it has seen a doubling of mobile traffic during the first quarter of this year compared to the same time period in 2011. Ericsson concludes that the speed in which mobile traffic is growing will see a growth of more than 15 times in the global mobile traffic by 2017.

Ericsson has also said that mobile providers will need to upgrade their mobile networks in order to truly serve their customers. While 4G is being rolled out by some providers, they don’t seem to be doing it quite quickly enough. There are also some mobile providers who are still dealing with second generation networks and those need to be replaced post haste.   Ericsson says that they believe that 85 percent of the world will have access to 3G technology by 2017 and that 50 percent of the world will be able to access 4G networks at that time.