Börje
Ekholm
Ericsson doubled its five-year forecast for cellular IoT connections to 3.5 billion and tipped 2018 to prove historic for the industry due to the first commercial launches of 5G.
According
to a report by Mobile
World Live,
Ericsson significantly increased its forecast for cellular IoT from
the 1.7 billion connections it predicted in Novemeber 2017
, citing
large-scale deployments in China, and increasing interest in low
power wide area (LPWA) networks using NB-IoT and LTE-M technologies
as factors.
Ericsson
said there were 700 million cellular IoT connections in 2017, so the
3.5 billion figure represents a compound annual growth rate of around
30 per cent.
With
China leading the surge, Ericsson said North East Asia is anticipated
to account for 2.2 billion of the 3.5 billion connections in 2023,
while “new massive cellular IoT technologies, such as NB-IoT and
Cat-M1 [LTE-M] are also taking off”.
The
predicted increase in cellular IoT connections was the stand-out
figure from the June 2018 mobility report, as Ericsson’s
predictions for 5G uptake remained unchanged at 1 billion
subscriptions by the end of the forecast period: it expects the
technology to account for around 20 per cent of all mobile data
traffic at that point.
Operators
will launch with enhanced mobile broadband as its first use case,
said Ericsson, with the US set to lead.
“Significant
5G subscription volumes” are also expected early in markets
including South Korea, Japan and China, while global 5G network
deployments are set to occur from 2020.
With
the first rollouts of 5G expected this year, Fredrik Jejdling, EVP
and head of business area Networks at Ericsson said 2018 “will
likely go into the history books as the start of an even bigger
societal change” than 2009, when mobile data traffic surpassed
mobile voice.
However,
he warned the change will require a combined effort from the industry
and regulators to align on spectrum, standards and technology.
“Securing
the right spectrum for 5G in low, mid and high bands will be
especially important in the near-term”, he said. “Global spectrum
harmonisation will be key to securing broad adoption of economies of
scale in of 5G.”
Ericsson
said mobile data traffic grew 54 per cent between Q1 2017 and Q1
2018, driven by rising smartphone subscriptions and increasing data
volume per subscription.
The
total number of mobile subscriptions hit 7.9 billion in the first
quarter of the year, with 98 million additions.
China
and India led the way, with 53 million and 16 million additions
respectively. The total number of mobile broadband subscriptions
stood at 5.5 billion, with 2.9 billion LTE subscriptions.
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