Ericsson has released Ericsson Mobility Report 2017, India Annexure, which shows key trends and forecasts on mobile traffic, subscriptions, consumer behavior and technology uptake in India. As per the report, the data traffic per smartphone user in India will grow to 11 GB per month by 2022.
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. By the Year 2022, 97 per cent of mobile data traffic will be smartphone traffic. 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.
Nitin Bansal, Head of Network Products, Ericsson India said,
As new apps continue to emerge and usage behavior 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.
Growing smartphone penetration and rapidly changing data usage patterns have focused attention on network performance in India. Top four indicators consumers use to judge network performance in India include : Time taken to upload pictures to social media ; time taken to open a web page ; time taken for a video to buffer or load and download time for email attachments. For 40 per cent of 4G users, video loading and video buffering while streaming is the main index by which they judge network performance. For almost half of 3G users, the time taken to load a web page is the prime indicator of a positive experience. 4G users are nearly 1.5 times more satisfied than 3G users in India .
In 2017, smartphone subscriptions in India are expected to represent 30 per cent of all mobile subscriptions. This number is expected to reach over 60 per cent by 2020 while 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 per cent per year, exceeding 1.4 Billion in 2022.
VoLTE subscriptions are projected to reach 4.6 billion by the end of 2022. The VoLTE subscriber base in India is pegged at 370 million. The introduction of VoLTE will 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.
LTE and WCDMA/HSPA 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 were 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.