India tops Asia in mobile customer addition in Q3, 2016: Study

India registered maximum growth in new mobile subscribers by adding over 15 million customers during July-September, 2016 period, Ericsson Mobility report released today, said.
"India grew the most in terms of net additions during the quarter (over 15 million), followed by China (over 14 million), Indonesia (over 6 million), Myanmar (over 4 million) and the Philippines (over 4 million)," the report said.
The number of mobile subscriptions exceeds the population in many countries, which is largely due to inactive subscriptions, multiple device ownership or optimization of subscriptions for different types of calls. As a result, the number of subscribers is lower than the number of subscriptions. Today, there are around 5.1 billion subscribers globally, compared to 7.5 billion subscriptions.

India currently has 1,050 million mobile subscriptions.
As per the report, 81 per cent of the Indian population has mobile subscription.
Today, there are around 5.1 billion subscribers globally compared to 7.5 billion subscriptions as per the study.

The study projected that 5G subscriptions globally will reach half a billion in 2022 and 25 per cent of all subscriptions will be in North America.
It said that 90 per cent of all subscriptions by 2022 will have mobile broadband services.
The study said that appetite among users will grow for watching live video streaming, leading to two-fold increase in application having live video feature.

"Around one in five smartphone users in the US expresses an interest in live video broadcast, but there are twice as many smartphone users in high growth markets like India, Indonesia, Brazil and Oman who are interested in such apps," the study said.
Ericsson uses historical data from various sources and verifies it with internal data to prepare the Mobility report.
The company has customers in 180 countries and support networks that connect more than 2.5 billion subscribers.
"Forty per cent of the world's mobile traffic is carried over Ericsson networks," Ericsson said.