The overall mobile subscriber base in the country is likely to grow to 1.4 billion by 2022 and nearly one-third of them will be 4G users, says a report by Ericsson Mobility.
India led the mobile subscribers growth globally with highest net addition of over 43 million customers in January- March 2017, it said.
China followed India with net addition of over 24 million mobile subscribers during the three-month period.
Indias total mobile subscriber base is expected to grow to over 1.4 billion in the next five years of which 520 million will be 4G subscribers, the report said.
The 5G service is expected to be operational in India by 2022 with subscriber base of around 3 million, it added.
“Based on trend of deployment of LTE by telecom operators in India, we feel 3G will be dominant technology in 2022,” Ericsson India, Head of Network Products, Nitin Bansal said.
The report, however, said that consumers 4G usage behavior is skewed towards data-centric services and 4G users are nearly 1.5 times more satisfied than 3G users in India.
“Mobile broadband experience in India is five times more effective in driving loyalty of customers than tariff structure and pricing,” it said.
Ericsson estimates that smartphone subscriptions will account for 60 per cent of the total mobile handset base in India compared to 30 per cent in 2017.
As per the report, the data traffic growth will be driven by video consumption. The data usage per smartphone user in India will grow to 11 GB per month by 2022 from 4GB at the end of 2016. This will lead take total data consumption across India from 1 exabyte or about 10 lakh terabytes per month by end of 2016 to 8 exabytes of data per month by 2022.
Whatsapp is most used application in India followed by Youtube on Android platform and Facebook on Apples iOS platform. Google maps is third most use application by users on both the platform, the report said.