Source Ericsson Mobility Report – Click to see larger image
The latest Ericsson Mobility Report November 2014 predicts that by 2020 the world’s smartphones will grow to 6.1Bn of a total 9.5Bn mobiles.
Currently Ericsson say there are 2.7 Bn smartphones (38% of the 7.1Bn total). Mobile broadband subscriptions are projected to grow from 2.9Bn to 8.4Bn by 2020.
Ericsson predicts that smartphone data usage will increase from an average of 900 MB per month today to 3.5 GB per month by 2020. The combination of more devices and higher usage will see smartphone data increase by a factor of 8 between 2014 and 2020.
Source Ericsson Mobility Report – Click to see larger image
In Australia Telsyth reported that there were 16 million smartphones in use in Australia at June 2014 and predicted that this would increase to 17.5 million by the end of the year. This represents 74.5% of Australia’s 23.5 M population owning a smartphone.
As such there will be lower growth in smartphone subscriptions in Australia than Ericsson predicts worldwide and a little less pressure on mobile data network growth. Maybe these will only need to grow by a factor of 5 to 2020.