Ericsson figures forecast North America as having the highest penetration by the end of 2029 – with 90% of subscriptions expected to be 5G.
FWA continues to grow in strength as a 5G use case for CSPs globally – with a sharp increase over the past year in the number of CSPs offering the service.
Of the CSPs sampled by Ericsson (310 globally), 241 offered FWA services as of April 2024.
Ericsson Mobility Report researchers found that, of these, 128 – about 53% included a 5G FWA offering. This is a twelve-point increase on the corresponding period in 2023 – a growth of 29%.
The speed, data handling and low latency capabilities of 5G FWA also increase the attractiveness of speed-based FWA tariff plans to CSPs. This has helped drive an almost 50% growth in the number of service providers offering 5G FWA speed-based tariffs in the past year – with 40 percent of all FWA CSPs now doing so. FWA is currently second only to eMBB as a 5G use case.
On subscriptions, the research shows 5G continues to grow in all regions with around 160 million 5G subscriptions were added globally in the first three months of 2024 – bringing the total to more than 1.7 billion.
Almost 600 million new subscriptions are expected in 2024 with researchers estimating that 5G subscriptions will be close to 5.6 billion by the end of 2029.
5G is expected to account for about 60% of all mobile subscriptions by the end of 2029.
Regionally, North America is forecast to have the highest penetration by the end of 2029 – with 90% (or 430 million) of subscriptions expected to be 5G.
On user experience, statistics from a leading service provider reveal 97% of all user activities on 5G mid-band achieved a time-to-content of less than 1.5 seconds – compared to 67 percent on 5G low-band and 38 percent on 4G (all bands).
North America is recognised in the research for rapid deployment – topping 85% mid-band coverage respectively.
Year-on-year mobile network data traffic has been adjusted downwards by Ericsson researchers due to changes in the underlying data, such as lower numbers reported by regulators and service providers in populous markets for the second half of 2023.
The research shows mobile network data traffic grew 25% year-on-year between the end of March 2023 and the end of March 2024 – driven primarily by subscriber migration to later generations and data-intense services, such as video.
Mobile data traffic is forecast to grow with a compound annual growth rate of about 20% through the end of 2029.
About a quarter of all mobile network data was handled by 5G by the end of 2023. This is forecast to grow to about 75% by the end of 2029.
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