India has highest monthly data usage per smartphone, 5G to be available by 2022: Ericsson

Driven by cheap and attractive data plans, India has emerged as a nation with the highest data monthly usage per smartphone in the world.

The second largest Internet market in the world has 9.8 gigabytes (GB) monthly usage per smartphone last year, said Swedish telecom firm Ericsson in its Mobility Report. Data-Intensive content such as mobile videos is mainly driving data usage growth.

The video will continue to drive data usage and we see monthly data usage per smartphone increasing from 9.8 GB in 2018 to 18 GB by 2024 growing at 11 percent CAGR, predicted the report.

The report further said that in spite of GSM technology dominance in the country, LTE subscription accounted for about 38% of mobile subscriptions. It will rise to represent over 80% of mobile subscriptions by 2024.

LTE will remain the most dominant access technology in the region up to 2024 even as 5G subscriptions are expected to grow during this period, said Nitin Bansal, head of Ericsson India.

5G subscriptions are estimated to become available in India in 2020 and will represent 6% of mobile subscriptions at the end of 2024. However, globally the 5G uptake will be faster than India, the report mentioned.

India is also expected to witness a rise in mobile data traffic at a CAGR of 23% from 4.6 exabytes (EB) in 2018 to 16 EB by 2024.

In the first quarter of this year, mobile data traffic grew 82 percent year-on-year globally. The high growth rate was mainly influenced by the increased
the number of smartphone subscriptions in India and increased data traffic per smartphone per month in China.

Besides, In India, the number of mobile subscriptions declined by 14 million. This was mainly due to the introduction of a minimum regular recharge amount by some large operators, to tackle low-paying users and increase average revenue per user (ARPU).

The total number of mobile subscriptions was around 7.9 billion. Around 44 million new subscriptions were added during the quarter. In the next five years, close to 95% of all subscriptions will be for mobile broadband, added the report.