A new report has shown that mobile subscriptions are growing at around 3 percent year-on-year globally and reached 7.5 billion in Q3. India grew the most in terms of net additions during the quarter (+15 million), followed by China (+14 million), Indonesia (+6 million), Myanmar (+4 million) and the Philippines (+4 million).
According to the latest Ericsson Mobility Report made available to Innovation Village, mobile broadband subscriptions are growing by around 25 percent year-on-year, increasing by approximately 190 million in Q3 2016 alone. The total number of mobile broadband subscriptions is now around 4.1 billion.
The report also revealed that LTE subscriptions continue to grow strongly, with ?160 million new subscriptions added during the quarter to reach a total of around 1.5 billion. WCDMA/HSPA added around 60 million subscriptions during the quarter. The majority of 3G/4G subscriptions have access to GSM/EDGE as a fallback. GSM/EDGE-only subscriptions declined by 100 million during Q3 2016.
“Subscriptions associated with smartphones continue to increase and have surpassed those for basic phones. 55 percent of all subscriptions are now for smartphones and, in Q3, smartphones accounted for close to 80 percent of all mobile phones sold,” the report stated.
The number of mobile subscriptions exceeds the population in many countries, which is largely due to inactive subscriptions, multiple device ownership or optimization of subscriptions for different types of calls. As a result, the number of subscribers is lower than the number of subscriptions. Today there are around 5.1 billion subscribers globally compared to 7.5 billion subscriptions.
