Aggressively cornering a third of all new mobile subscriptions across the globe in the first quarter of 2016—21 million out of 63 mn—India is now Number One in the world in this respect, the latest Ericsson Mobility Report (June 2016), said on Thursday.

What is more, with five million new subscriptions each, Myanmar and Indonesia are the second fastest growing markets, followed by the USA, bracketed with Pakistan, with three million new subscriptions each, during the first three months of 2016.

The number of mobile subscriptions exceeds the total population in many countries, largely due to inactive subscriptions, multiple device ownership or optimization of subscriptions for different types of calls. This means the number of subscribers is lower than the number of subscriptions. Today there are around 5 billion subscribers compared to 7.4 billion subscriptions, the report said.

In fact, penetration of subscriptions is 144 per cent of the population in Central and Eastern Europe, followed by Western Europe (131%), Latin America (112%), Middle East (113%), APAC—excluding China and India—(108%), and North America (109%). China (92%), Africa (81%) and India (80%) are yet to have 100% or more penetration.

Mobile subscriptions are growing around 3 per cent year-on-year globally and reached 7.4 billion in Q1 2016. India, with 21 million, grew the most in terms of net additions during the quarter, and now has a total of 1035 million subscriptions, second only to China (1295 mn)

Mobile broadband subscriptions are growing around 20 percent year-on-year, increasing by nearly 140 million in Q1 2016 alone. Long-Term Evolution (LTE) subscriptions continue to grow strongly, with 150 million new subscriptions. The total number of LTE subscriptions is now around 1.2 billion.

Given the massive explosion of video content available on the internet, there is a corresponding sharp increase in streamed video viewing, particularly among younger generations. “Today’s teens are streaming natives, as they have no experience of a world without online video streaming,” the report observed.

Viewing is gradually switching from traditional TV to streaming video on smartphones. Although most streaming is over Wi-Fi, high growth rates can be seen for teen data usage over cellular networks, as they stream video throughout the day – indicating a major shift in behavior. When looking at total time spent watching TV and video content at home, teens spend roughly as much time watching as others. In fact, when compared with internet users between 20-59 years old with smartphones, teens aged 16-19 reported similar overall viewing times at home to others both in 2011 and 2015.

However, screen preference is gradually changing from the traditional TV set to smartphones. This is a change that can be observed across age groups, although it is most clearly seen in teen behavior. Between 2011 and 2015, teens increased their TV/video viewing at home on smartphones by 85 percent and nearly halved their time spent watching on a traditional TV screen.

Older generations are slower to change. For example, 30–35 year-olds spent 4 hours more than teens in front of the traditional TV in 2011 and still did so in 2015. Video streaming situations spread out across time and place. When TV/video viewing migrates from fixed to mobile screens, viewing situations spread out across the day.

Teenagers have higher viewership and more video sessions for all parts of the day. This behaviour has also been verified by analysis of smartphone on-device measurements. Teens have increased smartphone TV/video viewing by 85% in four years.

Wi-Fi data use still grows faster than cellular data. With a lot of mobile device viewing time spent indoors, it is no surprise that over 85 per cent traffic generated by the use of smartphone video apps goes over Wi-Fi. However, given that video viewing is taking place across the whole day, there are situations where Wi-Fi is unavailable or insufficient, leading to an increase in video viewing over cellular networks.

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