India will have 810 million smartphone subscribers by 2021, predicts report
Swedish firm Ericsson said users in the country find activities that consume data more important than mere voice calls.
India's smartphone subscriptions will cross the 800 million mark by 2021, said an Ericsson Mobility report released on Tuesday. The report, which shows trends on mobile traffic, subscriptions, consumer behaviour and technology in India, predicts that there will be four-fold increase in smartphone subscriptions and mobile traffic will go up by 15 times.
Till 2015, only 16% of the Indian population had a smartphone, compared with 44% globally. This is likely to rise to 58% by the end of 2021.
The Swedish communication technology firm also said that 3G and 4G connections will increase, while the number of GSM subscribers will go down. The data traffic per active smartphone is expected to increase five-fold from 1.4GB per month in 2015 to 7GB per month by 2021.
According to the report, smartphone users in India find data more important than voice calls. Hence, it concludes that 99% of the mobile traffic will be from data by 2021. The top three data activities on the smartphone are web browsing, emailing and social networking.
For entertainment, streaming music and watching videos are the most popular activities on smartphones, said the report. Of the all the mobile apps, WhatsApp is the most popular, followed by Google Search and YouTube.