India will have a total of 800 million VoLTE subscribers by 2023, posting an annual growth of 42.5 per cent between 2017 and 2023, according to a study by mobile equipment manufacturer Ericsson.

LTE will account for more than 60 per cent of the total subscriptions in the country by 2023 compared with 12 per cent LTE subscriptions in 2017, the November edition of the Ericsson Mobility Report released today said.

“We expect LTE to be the most dominant technology in India by 2023,” said Nitin Bansal, Managing Director, Ericsson India.

The total mobile data traffic per month in India is expected to grow 11 times during the forecast period from 1.3 Exabytes (EB) to 14 EB by 2023. The report estimates that the monthly data usage per smartphone (GB/month) in India will rise 5 times from 3.9 GB in 2017 to 18 GB by 2023.

The total mobile subscriptions in the country as per the report stood at 1.185 billion in third quarter of 2017.

Globally, there will be 1 billion 5G subscriptions for enhanced mobile broadband by 2023, Ericsson forecasts.

Expected to be deployed first in dense urban areas, 5G will cover over 20 per cent of the world’s population by the end of 2023. The first commercial networks based on 5G New Radio (NR) are expected to go live in 2019, with major deployments from 2020. Early 5G deployments are foreseen in several markets, including the US, South Korea, Japan, and China.

Global mobile data traffic to surpass 100 Exabytes per month in 2023, it added.

Mobile data traffic is expected to surge by eight times during the forecast period, reaching 110 Exabytes per month by 2023. This corresponds to 5.5 million years of HD video streaming.

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