Explosive development of mobile broadband
- The number of mobile subscriptions worldwide has grown approximately 7 percent year-on-year during Q3 2013. The number of mobile broadband subscriptions grew even faster over this period – at a rate of 40 percent year-on-year, exceeding 2 billion in 2013. The number of mobile subscriptions will be tenfold by 2019 increasing to 9,3 billion and of this 5,6 billion will be smartphones as Ericsson forecasts in a report.
The amount of data usage per subscription also continued to grow steadily and around 55 percent of all mobile phones sold in Q3 2013 were smartphones. Today every fourth mobile phone is a smartphone which can also be seen as a handy palm computer.
90 percent of the world population will be have 3G coverage 2019 and 65 percent will have 4G/LTE. In the emerging economies as China and India Ericsson forecasts a great leap from GSM to 3G because smartphones are getting cheaper. The data traffics is also heavily increasing, primarily driven by increasing video viewing.
Streaming audio is will be a part of this but radio apps are not consuming much bandwidth compare with video and television. Radio will also be received via FM on smartphones (except iPhones).
Also read Radio in Smartphones Will Kill DAB
