Global cell phone subscriptions: Nearly half of all cell phone plans around the world will be 5G by 2030, according to a study from Nokia. By 2030, there will be about 10.3 billion mobile subscriptions. About 5.6 billion of those will be 5G subscriptions, which is a little more than half of all mobile subscriptions.
Nokia said in its “Global Network Traffic 2030” study that by 2030, almost 92% of all mobile subscriptions around the world will be on either 4G or 5G technology. By now, it is expected that each user will use 46.4GB (gigabytes) of data each month.
By 2030, almost half of all cell phone subscriptions will be 5G
The most recent Nokia report gives us a look at the numbers on a global level. This is not a surprise, since big Indian telecom companies like Airtel and Reliance Jio are also making big steps to grow 5G.
The seventh Indian Mobile Congress (IMC) took place last month in New Delhi. Akash Ambani stated that India has more than 125 million 5G customers, with 70 million of them being Jio subscribers. A network of more than a million 5G cells set up by the company across the country has already reached 8,000 towns and cities in India.
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Sunil Bharti Mittal, Chairman of Bharti Enterprises, said at the same event that Airtel’s 5G network will cover all of India by March 2024. He told everyone at the event that Airtel’s 5G services are already live in 5,000 towns and about 20,000 villages across India in his welcome speech.
By 2030, more FWA subscriptions will come from the APAC region, which includes India
Another interesting thing about Nokia’s study is that fixed wireless access (FWA) subscriptions will grow to about 271 million around the world by 2030. Instead of wired connections like fiber optic cable, the FWA uses wireless technology to connect fixed places to the internet at high speeds. It makes it easy to connect rural areas to the internet, where it can be hard to set up fiber infrastructure.
“Global FWA connections will reach 271 million by 2030, and APAC (including India) will be the leading region with a total of 121 million projected FWA subscriptions by 2030,” the report points out.
Both Airtel and Jio already have 5G-based FWA services in India. They are called “Airtel Xstream AirFiber” and “JioAirFiber,” respectively. During India’s holiday season in August and September, both companies launched their FWA services. At the moment, both Airtel’s Xstream AirFiber and JioAirFiber are only available in big places like Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Kolkata, and more. However, the companies plan to slowly bring them to other telecom sectors.
Video apps are the biggest source of global mobile data traffic
The study also says that video apps, which made up 72% of all mobile data traffic around the world in 2020, will continue to be a big source of traffic. This type of traffic will make up 60% of all mobile traffic by 2030.
To give you an idea, video apps include videos from social media sites like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube, as well as videos from Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Prime that you can watch whenever you want.
At the same time, traffic from social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Instagram, Snapchat, and others will continue to slowly grow, contributing 11 percent in 2022 and 11 percent in 2030.
