Enhanced mobile broadband will “definitely” emerge as the dominant 5G use case for operators, according to Patrik Cerwall, Ericsson’s head of strategic marketing, as the company forecast LTE will become the world’s leading access technology by the end of the year.

1B 5G subs by 2023
In the latest edition of its mobility report, Ericsson said preparations for 5G are gaining momentum and a number of operators were “gearing up for commercial launches”, which led it to a bullish forecast of 1 billion subscriptions by 2023.

Five months ago, Ericsson predicted 500 million 5G subscriptions by the end of 2022.

Speaking to Mobile World Live upon release of the latest report, Cerwall said the company anticipates “a lot of increase” in subscriptions, despite only skipping one year ahead from June’s forecast.

He also noted the 1 billion forecast was “higher than some of the analysts in the industry,” which he attributed to Ericsson’s belief standards would be released early, and the market would see deployments from as early as 2018.

“We have modelled this forecast very much on top of the 4G uptake,” he added: “When we look at how fast 4G was taking off, 5G will be at least as fast as 4G, maybe faster.”

While the forecast takes into account consumer uptake for 5G, Cerwall said the company had not yet divided up IoT connections with different technologies.

The company believes there will be 20 billion connected IoT devices by 2023 (again widely below the infamous 50 billion connected devices by 2020 once touted), with 1.7 billion IoT devices equipped with cellular connections.

By the end of 2017, there will be just 500 million IoT devices with cellular connections. By 2023, “IoT cellular connectivity will mainly be provided by LTE and 5G”, it stated in the report.

Cerwall said there will a few “major parts of 5G”: the machine type applications which will run on the technology, along with the mobile broadband use case to include fixed wireless access.

Dominant use case
In the build up to 5G, many operators, vendors and market watchers have touted the potential for the technology to enable a number of different use cases and business models beyond what 4G and 3G have previously offered.

Indeed, Ericsson highlighted automotive, manufacturing, energy and utilities, and healthcare alongside enhanced mobile broadband as some of the major 5G use cases.

However, Cerwall maintained operators’ “biggest revenue source will be on their main mobile broadband business, and that will be the most dominant in that aspect”.

“There will an upside on other areas like IoT,” he added.

4G to take over
Ericsson found total data traffic in mobile networks increased by 65 per cent from Q3 2016 to Q3 2017, with the number of LTE subscriptions “growing rapidly”.

In total, there were 95 million new mobile subscriptions in Q3 2017, resulting in a total of 7.8 billion, with 170 million additional LTE subscriptions.

Globally, the total number of mobile broadband subscriptions hit 5 billion in the quarter, with LTE accounting for 2.5 billion.

Ericsson said LTE is now anticipated to become the dominant access technology by the end of this year, overtaking GSM and 3G for the first time. In its June report, Ericsson tipped LTE to achieve the feat in 2018.

Cerwall said traffic continued to increase, “even though we were expecting a slowdown in terms of traffic growth yearly”, which led LTE to continue its march.

He also noted since the company’s last report in June, when just one operator had launched a so-called Gigabit LTE network, there are now 14, with the deployment rate expected to increase in 2018.