The overall mobile data traffic is anticipated to increase 12-fold by the end of 2018, according to the new edition of the Ericsson Mobility Report.
The report revealed that the video traffic, which is growing 60% per year, would drive the mobile-data traffic to growth until the end of 2018.
Ericsson’s latest report said that the rise in data usage is due to the continual growth in the amount of content available in addition to the improved network speeds through HSPA and LTE development.
Ericsson senior VP, Strategy head Douglas Gilstrap said LTE services will be available to about 60% of the world’s population in 2018.
"We expect LTE subscriptions to exceed 1 billion in 2017, driven by more capable devices and demand for data-intensive services such as video,"Gilstrap said.
"Owing to the build out of WCDMA/HSPA, network speeds have improved, and so has the user experience."
According to the report, video consumption is on average 2.6GB per subscription per month in some networks, while consumers would spend an average of up to 85 minutes per day on social networking in some networks.
Smartphones accounted for about half of all mobile-phone sales during the first quarter, when compared to 40% for the whole of 2012, with the total mobile subscriptions rising by 8% globally by Q1 2013.
Majority of subscriptions were added by WCDMA/HSPA, with 60 million subscriptions, while GSM/EDGE-only subscriptions rose by 30 million, and LTE added around 20 million new subscriptions, bringing the overall mobile-broadband subscriptions to around 1.7 billion, the report said.
Global smartphone subscriptions reached 1.2 billion in 2012, and are anticipated to reach 4.5 billion by the end of 2018.
