Finance Minister Piyush Goyal today announced that monthly mobile data usage in India has been increased by 50 per cent within no time and the data tariffs and voice call charges in the country are now the lowest in the world.
‘Mobile and its parts manufacturing companies have grown from 2 to 268 now, creating thousands of jobs in both urban and rural areas of the country,’ said Mr. Goyal while presenting the Interim Budget for 2019-20 in the Lok Sabha.
‘We aim to have one lakh digital villages in the next five years,’ he added.
According to a report by Swedish telecommunications giant Ericsson, the monthly data usage per smartphone (GB/month) in India will be 18GB by 2023.
‘LTE will be the dominating technology and will account for 60 per cent of the total subscriptions in the country by 2023,’ said Nitin Bansal, Managing Director, Ericsson India.
Ericsson also estimates that there will be around 780 million VoLTE subscribers in India by 2023, and the global mobile data traffic will surpass 100 Exabytes in 2023. This data corresponds to 5.5 million years of HD video streaming.
Video consumption has fuelled the mobile broadband traffic growth, and the young millennials – those in the 15 to 24 age bracket – are the driving force behind this growth, for they stream 2.5 times more than those over 45 years of age.
Ericsson further forecasts that there will be one billion 5G subscriptions for enhanced mobile broadband by 2023.
