Time.news – 2021 closed with 660 million 5G subscriptions worldwide, 98 million more in the fourth quarter alone. Ericsson’s latest Mobility Report states this.
Between October and December last, the number of mobile broadband subscriptions (i.e. those that allow you to use apps and online services) reached 6.9 billion, an increase of 6% year on year. Today 85% of mobile subscriptions are broadband. The leadership of LTE subscriptions is strengthened, which in the last quarter increased by approximately 37 million, reaching a total of 4.7 billion, or 57% of all mobile subscriptions. On the other hand, subscriptions to the older HSPA (-51 million) and GSM (-52 million) networks decreased.
It seems clear, therefore, that 5G is growing more than any other technology. And that by now it is starting to represent a substantial slice of the market. Analyzing the data in the report, 5G constitutes about 9.5% of mobile broadband subscriptions and just over 8% of total ones. The number of operators launching “fifth generation” services is also growing: about 200, twenty of which have implemented standalone 5G networks (ie completely autonomous).
Thanks to the increase in overall subscriptions, the diffusion of more performing networks (such as Lte and 5G) and due to the high consumption of video, data traffic increased by 8% compared to the previous quarter and by 44% year-over-year. It therefore more than doubled in the space of two years, exceeding the 80 exabyte mark for the first time.
The Mobility Report, as usual, counts how many Sims there are in circulation: in the fourth quarter of 2021 alone, mobile network subscriptions increased by 24 million units, bringing the total number to 8.2 billion. The largest quarterly contribution comes from China (+5 million), the United States (+4 million) and Pakistan (+3 million).
For some time now there have been Sims exceeding the world human population: there are 104 of them for every hundred inhabitants, with a higher penetration in Central-Eastern Europe (where penetration is 138%) and Western Europe (124%). Only in Africa (85%) and India (78%) are the inhabitants even more than the Sims.
The number of unique mobile subscribers, on the other hand, is approximately 6 billion. The gap between unique users and total cards is largely due to the presence of multiple Sims per person or inactive subscriptions.