Data Traffic per smartphone user in India to reach 11 GB per month by 2022

Ericsson in its Mobility Report 2017 releases today has reported key trends and forecasts on mobile traffic, subscriptions, and consumer behavior and technology uptake in India.

As per the report, the data traffic per Smartphone user in India will grow to 11 GB per month by 2022 while the total mobile data traffic in India is expected to grow at a CAGR of around 40 percent, reaching almost eight Exabytes of data per month compared to around 1 EB of data consumption by the end of 2016.

This massive growth in data traffic is fueled by fast-paced smartphone adoption, changing user behavior and disruptive pricing strategies of operators. Increased distribution and consumption of video and multimedia services as well as the growth in mobile banking transactions and digital payments are also fueling the data traffic in the country. By the Year 2022, 97 percent of mobile data traffic will be smartphone traffic.

Increasingly, data is generating far more traffic than voice calls. The interest in video streaming continues to grow. Today, consumers are increasingly watching videos on their smartphones. Social media services and apps, such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, are no longer used solely to post and share messages, but to stream videos as well. The ability to watch live broadcasts of user-generated and professional content on existing apps has also increased the appeal of live streaming.

"As new apps continue to emerge and usage behavior evolves, network performance will play an even bigger role in determining smartphone users' loyalty towards their operators. In fact, Mobile broadband experience in India is five times more effective in driving loyalty than tariff structure and pricing," said head of network products Ericsson India, Nitin Bansal.

GSM remained the dominant technology in 2016, accounting for over 70 percent of total mobile subscriptions. LTE and WCDMA/HSPA technologies are together expected to represent 85 percent of all Indian subscriptions by 2022, while 5G subscriptions are forecast to become available only in 2022, representing 0.2 percent of total mobile subscriptions reaching three million.

As of 2016, there were 23 million cellular IoT connections; by 2022 this is estimated to reach 191 million. Driving this growth is the government's Digital India vision; its focus on Smart Cities and villages, new use cases for IoT, and the launch of 5G.

As per the just released Ericsson Global Mobility Report 2017, VoLTE subscriptions are projected to reach 4.6 billion by the end of 2022. By this time, the VoLTE subscriber base in India is pegged at 370 million.

"VoLTE represents a great opportunity for telecom operators in India who are looking to route voice calls over 4G LTE networks enabling lower cost per minute for voice calls as well as free up legacy spectrum bands for re-farming," added Bansal.

Ericsson provides an end-to end VoLTE calling offering, including IMS, LTE-RAN, Evolved Packet Core, Mobile Switching, subscriber data management, BSS/OSS and professional services.

Its VoLTE solutions are designed to help telecom operators leverage an all-IP based network architecture to ensure improvement in voice quality by enabling services such as HD voice, enhanced HD voice, video calling, multi device and call enrichment amongst others.