india smartphone

Smartphones are giving people in low income areas access to services such as communications and transporation. Source: Shutterstock/knyazevfoto

Major growth spurt in mobile data usage expected to continue in India – Ericsson

By | 16 June, 2017

INDIAN smartphone users will consume 11GB of data per month by 2022, according to a report from Ericsson.

The communications technology provider’s Mobility Report 2017 found global year-on-year growth in mobile data from the end of the first quarter of last year was at its highest since 2013.

This was spurred by massive growth in India, according to the report, which is expected to continue at a compound annual growth rate of about 40 percent rising from a national total of 1 exabyte (one billion GB) a month at the end of 2016 to eight exabytes by 2022.

SEE ALSO: Rural India to get better legal aid through ‘Tele-Law’ video conferencing

“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,” Ericsson India head of network products Nitin Bansal told the Economic Times in a statement.

“In fact, mobile broadband experience in India is five times more effective in driving loyalty than tariff structure and pricing.”

The report found Indian consumers are judging network performance based on the speed of data services. The top four indicators used are: time taken to upload pictures to social media, time taken to open a web page, time taken for a video to buffer or load and download time for email attachments.

At present, smartphone subscriptions are at roughly 30 percent of total mobile subscriptions, but this is expected to rise to more than 60 percent by 2022 and by then, 97 percent of mobile data traffic will be smartphone traffic.

Earlier this week, telecoms newcomer Reliance Jio, which has the country’s fastest 4G speeds, said incumbents need to invest more in new technologies.



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Edd Gent is a science and technology writer based in Bangalore, India. His main areas of interest are engineering, technology and biology. He has been published by The Economist and the BBC, among other publications.

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