Incoming Ericsson CEO and current CFO Hans Vestberg has forecast that mobile connections will reach the 50 billion mark by 2020, dramatically rising from a predicted 7 billion subscribers in 2014.
Vestberg was bullish about growth in sector forecasting that the current 4 billion mobile users worldwide, will rise to 7 billon within five years, by which time there will also be 3 billion mobile broadband subscribers.
Speaking at the Broadband World Forum Europe in Paris, Vestberg said that by 2020 broadband “will be massively deployed.”
“We can see some 50 billion connections in 2020,” he said, with many of these being machine to machine links.
Vestberg added that sector could contribute significantly to the reduction of CO2 emissions. He claimed that if the tech sector were properly leveraged it could help reduce global carbon emissions 15% by 2020.
As the “most energy-efficient infrastructure ever created,” broadband will provide a key role in stimulating the economy during this evolution, Vestberg said.
Broadband investments could “reinforce several different low-carbon solutions such as virtual meetings, smart grids, m-governance, m-health, e-learning, e-paper, and so on. Even though these services might look very different from a user perspective, they all rely on the same underlying infrastructure.
“As representatives of the ICT sector, Ericsson and our industry peers have the task to bring this message home to our governments and politicians,” he said.