Ericsson: 90% of world’s population will be able to access HSPA connections by 2019

Swedish multinational telecoms company Ericsson has released its latest Mobility Report revealing that according to its data the number of global mobile subscriptions will reach 9.3 billion by 2019, 5.6 billion of which are predicted to be for smartphones.

The company also said that to support this explosion of contracted ownership, the mobile networks will improve their infrastructure, resulting in 90 percent of the world’s population being able to access WCDMA/HSPA upload and download speeds and 65 percent will be able to access LTE connectivity by 2019.

Douglas Gilstrap, Senior Vice President and Head of Strategy at Ericsson, noted that while it took more than five years to reach the first billion smartphone subscriptions, it will take less than two to hit the 2 billion mark; China and other emerging markets will drive this demand as increasingly lower-cost smartphones become available.

Naturally, with increased smartphone subscriptions and better infrastructure in place to support them, the amount of data consumed is also predicted to grow to reach 10 exabytes by 2019. Currently, video traffic is growing by 55 percent annually, and will represent more than 50 percent of the mobile data traffic, while social networking and web services will account for around 10 percent each in 2019, Ericsson said.

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