Almost everyone on the planet owns a smartphone. The numbers emerging from Ericsson's Mobility Report say it, according to which by now the diffusion of SIM cards has far exceeded that of people in the world: 7,9 billion, against 5,9 billion. But if this figure is certainly tainted by the count of inactive cards and by the fact that many people own more than one card (and in some cases more than one mobile phone), the more interesting one is that There are 6,3 billion smartphone subscriptions in the world today, a number which in turn exceeds that of people and which is equivalent to 70% of the total cards in circulation.
On these smartphones, more and more people use Internet data traffic. The increase, in the fourth quarter of 2019 alone, was almost 10%, with 130 million more mobile broadband subscriptions. I am instead LTE subscriptions increased by 170 million to 4,3 billion, or 55% of all mobile subscriptions. And 5G, the enabling technology of the Internet of things and above all of artificial intelligence, is also starting to make its way, which is unleashing a real remote warfare between the US and China, with Washington trying in every way to stem Huawei's monopoly, including by financing European players such as Nokia: in the last quarter of 2019, 5G subscriptions reached 13 million worldwide.
Speaking of China and Chinese technology, it should also be added that if it is true that subscriptions and data traffic are increasing, this occurs in a scenario in which the sale of hardware, i.e. real telephones, is slowing down and became the prerogative of Beijing: if ten years ago the challenge was mainly between the American Apple and the Korean Samsung, today 35% of the market is in the hands of the Chinese Huawei, Xiaomi and Oppo. Asia is also the epicenter of mobile SIM sales, given that the largest contribution to quarterly growth comes from China (+7 million), followed by Indonesia (+5 million) and the Philippines (+4 million).
The diffusion of smartphones and the possibility of accessing the Internet for any type of use (now also for working, with smart working, as we are seeing in these weeks of coronavirus emergency, as well as for the increasingly frequent viewing of videos), ensure that the data traffic used continues to grow naturally and inexorably: from the fourth quarter of 2018 to that of the following year increased by a whopping 49% to 40 Exabytes (EB), while the quarterly growth was around 8%.
As a result, more and more time is spent in front of these gadgets: from one hour and 48 minutes a day in 2015, to four hours and 8 minutes a day today, more than double in five years. In the 18-34 age group, it even reaches almost 5 hours a day: according to research by LivePerson, 65% of those aged between 18 and 34 communicate more digitally than in person. In times of coronavirus it would seem like a right precaution, but the truth is that it always is.
