Ericsson: Global mobile subscriptions pass 5 billion

For every seven people on the face of the earth, there are now five mobile connections, according to an analysis by wireless equipment vendor Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC). This week, the world passed the 5 billion subscription mark, adding connections at a rate of roughly 2 million a day.

The globe now effectively has a 74% penetration, with the rapid take-up of mobile in India and China leading the latest wave of additions. China alone now has more mobile subscriptions than existed in the entire world in 2000. Given that the world’s population is a little more than 6.8 billion, you’d expect the rate of new subscriptions to slow down, but Ericsson has concluded quite the opposite. It expects the rate of growth to pick up speed in the next 10 years, as mobile broadband and machine-to-machine (M2M) connections start picking up the slack from individual mobile phone subscriptions. By 2020, Ericsson expects the world to support a total of 50 billion wireless connections.

Ericsson found that there are now 500 million mobile broadband connections in the world accessing 3G networks, but it predicted that number will grow to 3.4 billion in 2015, as the half the world’s population begins accessing the Internet from mobile devices. But the key area of growth will be in the machine space, where customers begin connecting multiple devices, such as tablets, e-book readers and laptops, to 3G networks and an even larger wave of industry driven M2M devices emerge.

“For energy companies it could be smart meters that read themselves, increase business efficiency and cut operational expenses,” Ericsson’s study stated. “In transportation, tracking solutions improve route optimization and safety for vehicles on the road. Digital signs that can be updated remotely, cameras that can send pictures halfway around the world and even a soda machine that requests restocking when needed are other examples that machine-to-machine technology make possible.”