Ericsson on Monday dumped its massive cache of mobile stats via the company’s Mobility Report, and North America actually stands out as a growth region.
While Ericsson points to the usual suspects of China, India and Indonesia as the fastest growing regions, Patrik Cerwall, head of strategic & tactical marketing at Ericsson, said that North America and Russia both show significant growth in the third quarter.
“What we see is four million new subscriptions in the United States,” Cerwall said.
Cerwall attibuted much of the growth in places like North America to subscribers adding multiple devices to their plans. Nearly 90 percent of households in the United States have at least three Internet connected devices.
According to the report, there were 6.9 billion mobile subscriptions globally and 2.5 billion mobile broadband subscriptions in the third quarter.
Differentiating subscriptions from subscribers, Ericsson points out that there are currently about 4.6 billion subscribers. By 2020, fully 70 percent of the world is expected to have access to a 4G connection. 
All those connections are poised to rack up a ton of data, with average usage per smartphone to rise from the present 800MB to 3.5GB per month in 2020.
Overall, mobile traffic is expected to grow by 8 times from now until 2020, with video accounting for 55 percent of all traffic.
Ericsson estimates 230 million cellular M2M connections globally, with a majority of those connections on 2G. That’s all changing however. Nearly 50 percent of M2M connections will be on 3G and 4G by 2018.
Filed Under: Infrastructure