Mobile subscription has increased from 720 million in 2000 to striking 5 billion on July 8, 2010, according to an estimate by Ericsson.
The growth in mobile subscription is backed by demand from emerging markets like India and China. China alone has more mobile subscriptions today than the total number of mobile subscriptions in 2000.
The company said that the mobile broadband subscriptions are growing at similar pace and are expected to cross 3.4 billion mark by 2015, compared to 360 million in 2009. And 80% of all people accessing the Internet will be doing so using their mobile device.
According to Ericsson, mobile subscriptions facilitates daily operations of small businesses and drives economic growth. In mature markets, connected devices are driving the increase in network traffic.
The company claims that in December 2009, the amount of data traffic carried over mobile networks surpassed the amount of traffic generated from voice calls.
Further, the company projects mobile subscriptions to reach 50 billion within this decade with Machine-to-machine communications (M2M), playing a key role in the future growth of the mobile industry.
