A ‘Mobility Report’ by telecommunications provider Ericsson predicted that overall data traffic in India will grow five time in the next five years.
Data traffic that is currently 1.9 exabytes per month will touch 10 exabytes per month by 2023. One exabyte is the equivalent of one billion gigabytes (GB), a single gigabyte of data is required for one-hour of high-definition video streaming. The massive jump in data usage will be thanks to a combination of increased data usage by smartphone users, monthly data usage per smartphone is expected to climb from 5.7GB in 2017 to 13.7GB in 2023 as well as increased smartphone usage.
The report predicts that the number of smartphones in India will touch 925 million by 2023. The increased data usage will require new 5G networks and there will also be the migration of voice services onto VolTE channels, which treats voice like data, and the report expects that India will have 780 million VolTE users by 2023.
However, while data traffic in India will grow dramatically, it will remain a small proportion of global data, with data consumption over mobile networks growing to over 107 exabytes by 2023.