Global Mobile Broadband Adoption Grows 45 Percent

The number of mobile subscriptions globally has grown 8 percent between the first quarter of 2012 and the first quarter of 2013, Ericsson reports. Of the 130 million net new account additions, 30 million were added in China, 27 million in the rest of Asia and 27 million were added in Africa.

About 13 million net new accounts were added in Latin America, 10 million in India, 10 million in Central and Eastern Europe and eight million in the Middle East. Just three million net new accounts were added in North America.

Counting all subscriber information models in use, global mobile penetration was at 90 percent, or 6.4 billion accounts. The actual number of subscribers is about 4.5 billion.

Penetration is 132 percent in Central and Eastern Europe, 128 percent in Western Europe, 114 percent in Latin America, 109 percent in the Middle East and 103 percent in North America.

In the Asia-Pacific region excluding China and India, penetration is 100 percent. Penetration in China is 84 percent, in Africa 71 percent, in India 56 percent.

Mobile broadband subscriptions grew 45 percent to reach 1.7 billion.

About 50 percent of all mobile phones sold in the first quarter of 2013 were smartphones, resulting in a doubling of mobile data traffic between 2012 and 2013, Ericsson also says.

Long Term Evolution fourth generation networks are being deployed and built-out in all regions and will reach around two billion subscriptions in 2018.

Video traffic on mobile networks and is expected to grow by around 60 percent annually up until the end of 2018, by which point it is forecast to account for around half of total global traffic.

Video traffic is likely to represent the majority of all mobile data traffic by 2018.

Music streaming and audio are expected to grow with a annual growth rate of around 50 percent. Smartphone users who subscribe to both music and video streaming services already consume more than 2 GB of data traffic per month on average, more than four times the consumption of an average smartphone user.

Web browsing and social networking will each constitute around 10 percent of the total data traffic volume in 2018.

During 2013, overall mobile data traffic is expected to continue the trend of doubling each year, Ericsson predicts.