APAC leads global LTE adoption: Ericsson

Source: Ericsson.
Ewaldsson.

Ericsson Chief Technology Officer Ulf Ewaldsson has shared the latest updates from the Ericsson Mobility Report, including how the Asia Pacific (APAC) region is leading in LTE technology adoption.

“With half of the world’s total mobile subscriptions, APAC sets the pace of the change that our industry is facing,” said Ewaldsson, pointing out that Asia is a growth region with relatively little fixed infrastructure, making the default method of Internet access in many areas mobile broadband. “It is obvious why the top five LTE markets belong to this region.” 

According to the report, Korea is no. 1 in the world for LTE adoption with 66% penetration, followed Singapore (48%), then Japan, Hong Kong and Australia. The report also predicts that 65% of world’s population will be covered by LTE by 2019, and almost half of all mobile traffic in the networks will be video. Ewaldsson noted that 1.3 billion, or half, of all LTE subscriptions by 2019 will be in APAC, including in China and India. 

Asia Pacific dominates in the number of mobile subscriptions.

Ewaldsson said that we are moving towards a Networked Society where connectivity will move beyond smartphones to items that were never connected in the past.

"Cars will be connected and constantly exchange live data to increase safety. Remote healthcare with a real-time information flow will make it easier for both doctors and patients. This industry transformation will place new demands on the network, but also create more value to the network. The network will become even more relevant,” said Ewaldsson. "In addition, the machine-to-machine (M2M) or machine-type communications will add a whole new dimension to data consumption and information exchange in our networks.”

The new demands on the Internet will require a new network architecture by 2020 that Ericsson calls '5G'. Ericsson forecasts that by 2020, mobile  data volumes will have grown by 1,000 times, and says that there will be up to 100 times as many connected devices. "The future 5G network will need to be enormously fast, boosted by caching solutions on devices managed on the cloud," he said. 

With mobility, broadband and the cloud as key technology components, the Ericsson CTO added that future networks will be one common platform for multiple industries even though industries traditionally create their own networks. This is because spectrum is a finite resource, he explained. "We see a business opportunity in making more efficient use of existing spectrum," he said.

Ericsson is also investing in cloud, software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualisation (NFV), as well as security, automation and governance of data in the cloud.