The report, published today, reveals IoT, which is categorised as connected cars, machines, utility metres, remote metering and consumer electronics, will surpass standalone mobile phones in 2018, with growth in connected devices “driven by emerging applications and business models”, as well as falling device costs.

According to the report, IoT connected devices overall will hit almost 16 billion of a total 28 billion connected devices by 2021, representing a CAGR of 23 per cent annually.

Of those, ‘only’ 1.5 billion will have a cellular subscription, growing from approximately 400 million at the end of 2015.

Notably, the company’s forecast for 28 billion devices is well below its previously touted “vision” of 50 billion devices by a 2020 timeframe, which it backtracked on last year.

As well as falling device costs and innovative applications, Rima Qureshi, SVP and chief strategy officer at Ericsson, said deployment of 5G will contribute to forecasted IoT growth.

“From 2020, commercial deployment of 5G networks will provide additional capabilities that are critical for IoT, such as network slicing and the capacity to connect exponentially more devices than is possible today,” she said.

The company also reiterated a previously forecasted goal of 150 million 5G subscriptions globally by 2021.

Smartphones to overtake basic phones

Other highlights from the report revealed that smartphone subscriptions are expected to surpass those for basic phones in Q3 this year for the first time, and will apparently double from 3.4 billion to 6.3 billion by 2021. Smartphones accounted for close to 80 per cent of all mobile phones sold in Q1 2016.

Overall mobile subscriptions hit 7.4 billion in Q1 2016, and are growing 3 per cent globally, said Ericsson (compared to 5 billion actual mobile subscribers), with India seeing the largest rise in net additions in Q1 with 21 million adds, followed by five million in Myanmar.

By 2021 the Swedish vendor expects there to be 9 billion mobile subscriptions, 7.7 billion mobile broadband subscriptions and 6.3 billion smartphone subscriptions.

LTE subscriptions also continue to grow, with 150 million new subscriptions in Q1 2016, with the technology accounting for approximately 1.2 billion subscriptions worldwide in total. By end 2021 the 4G technology will total 4.3 billion subscriptions.

Booming data traffic

Data traffic growth

Meanwhile data traffic continues to explode. Data traffic grew around 10 per cent quarter on quarter and 60 per cent year on year in Q1 2016. Looking ahead, between 2015 and 2021 there will be a 12x growth in smartphone traffic, says Ericsson. Around 90 per cent of mobile data traffic will be from smartphones by the end of 2021.

Ericsson added that “a long anticipated milestone” is also being passed in 2016, with LTE supporting downlink peak speeds of 1Gb/s, a feat expected in the second half of the year from operator networks in the US, Japan, South Korea and China.

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