By PRINCE OSUAGWU

World renowned telecommunications infrastructure vendors, Ericsson, seems to be putting into good use the whopping 8 billion dollars it sets aside every year in Research and Development, R&D, to clearly understand the dynamic and change pattern of technologies that govern the telecommunications industry.

In a chance meeting in Ghana, recently, President of the company, Mr Hans Vestberg had told this reporter that in 2016 the world was going to experience two revolutions in deployment and installation phases of technology operations.

From his explanation, in the near future, the deployment phase may be tilted towards provision of unique equipment and infrastructure other than what is obtainable at the moment, while the installation phase, deals with a period when consumers would naturally use technology in different ways than they are used to.

The implication of these revolutions, according to him, was that only those who understood these dynamics, tailor services towards them, would remain relevant in business within the period.

However, it seems as if things are happening faster than Vestberg imagined. If Ericsson’s second traffic and market report , released last week, is anything to go by, the revolutions are already here.

The report which was conducted on the pulse of Networked Society, revealed that for many people around the world, the mobile phone has become a major means of accessing the internet and in the near future, may become the only means.

The report also predicted that 85 percent of the world’s population will have internet coverage via 3G by 2017 even as there will then, be close to nine billion mobile subscriptions, compared to six billion by the end of 2011.

Part of the predictions of the report included that mobile broadband subscriptions, will reach five billion in 2017, as against the one billion mark attained by the end of 2011.

Presenting the report to the media in Lagos, last week, Ericsson Nigeria’s Government & Industry Relations Manager, Mr Olaseni Ashiru, noted that from the report, Ericsson discovered that people across the world, now see access to the internet as a prerequisite for any device, fuelling a growing demand for mobile broadband and increased data traffic.

For him, operators have also come to recognize the business opportunity in this mindset and are aiming to facilitate this growth by providing good user experience with fast data speeds through high capacity networks.

The result of this development is that today, around 75 percent of the HSPA networks worldwide have been upgraded to a peak speed of 7.2 Mbps or above and around 40 percent has been upgraded to 21 Mbps.

Consequent upon that, Ericsson sees half of the world’s population covered by LTE/4G networks by 2017,while Smartphone subscriptions will grow to around three billion. As at end of 2011, there were about 700 million smart phone subscriptions around the world.

According to the report,there was a continuous mobile data traffic increase, particularly, between Q1 2011 and Q1 2012, and the prime drivers were video and Smartphones . Yet, it is expected that the mobile data traffic will grow by 15 times between 2011 and 2017.

Between countries and regions, the report presented variations in data report.  For instance, China added very significant subscriptions in mobile net for a single country in Q1 2012 with 39 million, followed by India with 25 million. The Asia Pacific region added in total 93 million subscriptions, followed by Africa with 30 million.

Meanwhile.the report admitted that Central Europe, Middle East and Africa, showed strong growth due to population and GDP and will continue so till 2017.

However, the difference would be that while developed economies are migrating to higher technologies, like HSPA, LTE, reducing the subscription edge of GSM/EDGE, emerging markets like Africa would take a totally different growth pattern because new low end users entering the mobile networks would likely use the cheapest mobile phones and subscriptions available.

But the continouos trend thrown open by the report is the fact that everything is going mobile – An evolution said to be driven by video, cloud-based services, internet and machine to machine connectivity.

This trend according to the report has come to change the way people behave, leverage mobility to communicate and improve their understanding of using new and existing services to improve their daily lives.

This paradym shift seems to be leaving mobile operators , services providers, across the world, constantly wearing their thinking caps.

Ericsson’s forecasts are based on historical data from various sources, validated with Ericsson internal data. Its forecasts on future developments are based on macroeconomic trends, end user trends, market maturity, technology development expectations, industry analyst reports , on a national or regional level.