Mobile internet users to hit 3.5 billion by 2015

Global mobile broadband users will grow from 500 million today to 3.5 billion by 2015, according to the head of mobile broadband at Ericsson.

Magnus Ewerbring said at the Mobile Broadband World 2010 event in London that the rise in mobile broadband had "only just started", and that the services being used will change radically in the coming years.

Operators need to ensure that networks are primed to provide high availability and good coverage to allow services to run smoothly, Ewerbring warned.

"Users will benchmark networks on performance and availability, and if they don't get a good network experience they will be up for grabs from other competitors," he said.

Ewerbring expects huge growth in the number of connected devices in the home by 2020, as many as 10 per household and leading to some 50 billion connected devices adding to the pressure on networks.

However, he is confident that networks will continue to evolve to meet these demands, citing new speeds already on offer around the world.

"USB dongles are able to provide speeds of 21Mbit/s and 28Mbit/s, and this will continue to rise. It's much more efficient to transmit one bit of data compared with voice, as you can use tricks that you can't do with voice," he said.

"We expect 80 per cent of all mobile broadband connections to be hosted through HSPA or LTE by 2015, ranging from high-end devices like the iPhone 4 to lower end entry level Android devices."

Ewerbring also said that maturing markets are having a huge impact on this growth, and that social networks in particular are stimulating demand.

"Facebook is proving immensely popular in Indonesia, for example, and driving the demand for smartphones, while in Brazil we expect mobile broadband to overtake fixed connections this year."

Antonios Drossos, a managing partner at mobile analyst firm Rewheel, believes that demand for mobile data means the end of a free reign on data policies, warning that operators will always need to stipulate fair use agreements on all offers.