China to rank No 1 for LTE users by 2020

"As of today, with a total 200 million subscribers, China has surpassed America to become the world's number one Long-Term Evolution (LTE) market by user volume," Chang Gang, chief marketing officer of Ericsson North East Asia said on Tuesday during the launch of the Chinese-Language Ericsson Mobility Report in Beijing.

According to Chang, by 2020 China will permanently take top spot with nearly one third of the 3.7 billion worldwide LTE subscriptions.

Chang Gang, chief marketing officer of Ericsson North East Asia delivers a keynote speech on June 30, 2015 during the launch of the Chinese-Language Ericsson Mobility Report in Beijing. [Photo/Provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

There remains big potential in the industry however. Although there are 200 million 4G subscribers in China, in terms of user penetration, South Korean's volume has reached 70 percent, much higher than China's 20 percent.

"Our monthly average mobile data traffic only reaches 320 Megabytes, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, while the same volume in South Korea has up to 2.2 Gigabyte, which is nearly 10 times higher than China," Chang added.

[Photo/Provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

The report, produced by Swedish multinational IT company Ericsson, shares forecast data, analysis and insight into mobile traffic, subscriptions and consumer behavior.

According to latest information, mobile data traffic in the first quarter of this year was 55 percent higher than the same period in 2014. By 2020, 80 percent of mobile data traffic will be from smartphones.

The report also indicates that smartphone subscriptions will more than double, reaching 6.1 billion, 70 percent of the world's population will be using smartphones and 90 percent will be covered by mobile broadband networks.

[Photo/Provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

In developing regions, the growth comes from new subscribers as smartphones become more affordable; almost 80 percent of smartphone subscriptions added by year-end 2020 will be from Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Africa.

"This immense growth in advanced mobile technology and data usage, driven by a surge in mobile connectivity and smartphone uptake, will makes today's big data revolution feel like the arrival of the floppy disk," said Rima Qureshi, Ericsson's senior vice president and chief strategy officer.

According to the report, each year until 2020, mobile video traffic will grow by a staggering 55 percent annually and will constitute around 60 percent of all mobile data traffic by the end of that period.

Growth is largely driven by shifting user preferences towards video streaming services, and the increasing prevalence of video in online content including news, advertisements and social media.