Mobile Traffic in the APAC Region to Increase Sevenfold by 2021: An Ericsson Report

FREMONT, CA: Ericsson, a provider of telecommunications services and solutions, in its latest mobility report announces the total mobile traffic across mobile networks in the South East Asian and Oceania region is expected to increase 7 times from 0.5 Exabyte (EB) per month to 6 EB by 2021.

According to the South East Asia and Oceania Ericsson Mobility Report for June 2016, an estimate of smartphone subscriptions is projected to increase at a CAGR of 15% until 2021, doubling from 340 million in 2015 to 820 million in 2021.

According to the report, factors responsible for the growth of mobile broadband services in the region include rise in popularity ofdata-intensive applications like video and affordability of smartphones and other devices.

LTE subscriptions also contribute for the growth, which according to the report will surpass 100 million by the end of the year 2016. It also states that the next five years will experience new services from mobile service providers such as voice over LTE and LTE-advanced features.

Australia, Malaysia and Singapore are stated to be leading in terms of latency and speed, in the region. However, the report ignored other countries in the region such as New Zealand and other countries in Asia, in this regard of network performance for latency and speed.

Australia is also the only country in the South East Asia region to have adopted the Asia-Pacific Telecommunity (APT) 700MHz band consisting of 698-806MHz, marking it as the leader of network performance with the lowest cell-edge latencies in the region.

"The data traffic is going to grow to 6 exabytes per month for 2021," says Emilio Romeo, head of Ericsson Australia and New Zealand, during a call with media on Thursday afternoon. “If we look at our region, 100 million LTE subscriptions will be reached by 2016. Smartphone penetration in Australia was 90 percent, we already reached 90 percent in 2015, and it will surpass the 100 percent [mark] for 2021," he added.