Ericsson estimates that the number of global mobile broadband subscriptions will reach 1 billion this year.
The greatest number of mobile broadband subscriptions, about 400 million, will be concentrated in the Asia Pacific region, with North America and Western Europe forecast to account for more than 200 million subscriptions each.
Ericsson now predicts that mobile broadband subscriptions will top 3.8 billion by 2015, with nearly all of the growth driven by HSPA, CDMA and LTE networks. The estimate marks an increase from its prior July estimate, which pegged the number of mobile broadband subscriptions in 2015 at 3.4 billion. There were just 360 million mobile broadband subscriptions in 2009.
The new forecast comes just six months after the infrastructure company reported the number of 3G subscriptions reached the 500 million mark, and mobile data traffic was reported in August to have tripled in just one year.