In Africa, GSM/EDGE-only subscriptions will remain the most common subscription type for the next five years due to the high numbers of lower income consumers using 2G-enabled handsets, says Fredrik Jejdling, president and head of Ericsson sub-Saharan Africa.
Jejdling was commenting on the latest Ericsson Mobility Report (November 2014) that reveals the continuing dramatic spread of mobile technology worldwide.
He is further quoted as saying, “The increased availability of low-cost smartphones in sub-Saharan Africa will lead to a rapid increase of smartphone subscriptions in the region.
The report makes a startling prediction: 90 percent of people aged six years and over will have mobile phones by 2020, when the number of smartphone subscriptions is set to reach 6.1 billion. Mobile video traffic is set by then to have increased tenfold and constitute around 55 percent of all mobile data traffic.
In developing regions growth is being driven by new subscribers, as phones become more affordable. By contrast, growth in mature markets is coming from the increasing number of devices per individual.
According to the report, the Asia Pacific, Latin America and Middle East and Africa regions will all move from being mainly GSM/EDGE-only subscriptions markets in 2014 to become mainly WCDMA/HSPA and LTE subscriptions markets by 2020.
The total number of mobile subscriptions in Q3 2014 was around 6.9 billion. This included the addition of 110 million new subscriptions during Q3.