By 2015 today’s global mobile subscriber base will increase dramatically from the current 5.3 billion to a staggering 7-8 billion.

This upbeat prediction was made by Ericsson’s CEO Hans Vestberg at the company’s annual MWC media event yesterday morning. Three key elements are required to create what Vestberg dubbed ‘The Networked Society’; mobility, broadband (and increasingly this will be mobile broadband) and the cloud. “Mobile broadband is the key driver” said Vestberg, “In ten or twenty years the networked society will mean that everything that can benefit will be connected.”

Citing numerous studies on the impact of mobile broadband, Vestberg said that for every 1000 new broadband connections 80 new jobs were created and a 10 percent increase in broadband traffic spurred a 1 per cent increase in sustainable GDP. The number of mobile broadband users has now reached 1.8 billion and Vestberg expects this figure to rise to 5 billion by 2016. This will lead to an increase of 25 percent in the amount of data traffic over mobile networks and, Vestberg claimed, 50 percent of that traffic will be carried over Ericsson-supplied networks.

In support of its view on the importance of the cloud in future development, Vestberg unveiled a strategic alliance with internet giant Akamai which will be focused on bringing to market mobile cloud acceleration solutions.
(MBB)

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