Global data traffic – click to see in fullThe number of smartphone subscriptions will triple over the next six years, according to Ericsson’s Q3 Mobility Report, reaching 5.6bn by 2019.
Smartphones currently account for between 25 and 30 per cent of phones in use, but will come to represent 70 per cent of the 9.3bn mobile phones used in 2019. Smartphone penetration grew by 7 per cent in Q3 compared to the same time a year earlier.
3G will be available to 90 per cent of the world's population by then, with 4G on offer to 65 per cent of people. 2.6bn people worldwide will use 4G in 2019, 88 per cent of people in the US, followed by Western Europe, at 55 per cent.
There was an 80 per cent increase in mobile data usage from Q3 2012 to 2013, and this is set to grow a further 10 times between 2013 and 2019, reaching 10 exabytes – or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.
Video traffic will go from having a 35 per cent to a 50 per cent share of usage, while social networking and web services will account for around a 10 per cent each in 2019.
