5G and LTE Subscription Forecasts until 2030

In an earlier blog post in the Edge of the Cloud blog, titled "5G Forecasts – The Past, Present and Future: 2008 – 2039 (Starting from LTE)" [1], we listed numerous LTE and 5G-related forecasts and historical data between 2009 and 2039. In this blog, we will take a closer look at forecasts for the growth of LTE and 5G subscribers. The approach we follow is to take an average over forecasts from different sources for each year. The source data is available in our above-mentioned earlier blog post.

LTE Subscriptions from 2010 to 2022

Figure 1 shows the average over projected and historical LTE subscriptions for each year between 2010 and 2022 together with error bars which represent the 95% confidence intervals (a 95% confidence interval provides a range of values which is likely to contain the population parameter of interest, that is, the number of LTE subscriptions in our case, at a 95% confidence level [2]). As an example, the average over projected subscribers for 2022 is 4,73 billion. The larger the error bars, the larger are the differences between forecasts from different sources. For 2022, the highest forecast is 5,6 billion and the lowest 4,0 billion LTE subscriptions.

Figure 1 - Global LTE subscriptions from 2010 to 2022

Between 2013 and 2022, the number of LTE subscriptions is growing in a near linear fashion from 217,2 million to 4,7 billion. In some cases, the differences between two or more consecutive years are not statistically significant. This is true for example for years 2020-2022. However, the difference between years 2019 and 2022 is statistically significant, that is, we can say that there are likely to be more LTE subscriptions in 2022 than there will be in 2019.

5G Subscriptions from 2020 to 2030

What about 5G, then? Figure 2 shows the average taken over 5G subscription forecasts from different sources for each year between 2020 and 2030. As we can observe, the error bars get very large as we move further away in time due to the projections from different sources being all over the place (year 2030 is, after all, 13 years to the future, so it is understandable that different analysts’ estimates differ). As an example, for 2030, the lowest estimate is 2,2 billion, whereas the highest estimate is twice as high. Even more extreme example is year 2024, for which the lowest prediction, from Machina Research, is only 41 million 5G subscriptions and the highest one, from IDATE, is 829 million (an over 20x difference!).

Figure 2 - Global 5G subscriptions from 2020 to 2030

LTE and 5G Subscription Growth Compared

Figure 3 shows LTE and 5G subscriptions for each year after the commercial launch of LTE and 5G networks. For LTE, year 1 is 2010 and for 5G, 2020. The error bars overlap for most of the years, meaning that the differences are not statistically significant. However, if looking only at the average values, we can see that initially, during the first four years following launch, 5G would see a much higher number of subscriptions compared to LTE. As an example, at the end of the first year of commercial launch of LTE networks, there were 420.000 LTE subscriptions. For 5G, the average projection is 7,3 million subscriptions, which is over 17 times higher. However, starting from year 5, 5G falls behind LTE. Between years 7 and 9, 5G lags behind LTE by around 1 billion subscriptions and the figures for LTE are up to over twice as high as for 5G. Starting from around year 9 (2028), 5G adoption will accelerate and seems to start catching up with LTE. If we extrapolate for year 12 (2031), 5G might even exceed the number of subscriptions for LTE’s year 12 (2023).

Figure 3 - Global LTE and 5G subscriptions during each year after launch

Global Mobile Subscriptions from 2008 to 2030

Finally, Figure 4, shows the total number of global mobile subscriptions (2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G) from 2008 to 2030. The error bars become higher and higher the closer we get to year 2030 since the projections from different sources vary greatly. As an example, the lowest forecast for 2030 is 9,2 billion global mobile subscriptions, whereas the highest forecast is 17,1 billion. However, due to the high variance in the estimates especially for the most distant years, for example the difference between years 2030 and 2010 is not statistically significant.

Figure 4 - Global mobile subscriptions from 2008 to 2030

What conclusions can we draw from this analysis? 

• First, on the average, analysts seem to believe that 5G will have, compared to LTE, extremely strong first four years. However, from year 5 onwards, 5G will considerably lag behind LTE's adoption figures. But in the long term, 5G will catch up with LTE’s subscription levels. So a strong start, then a slow-down for 5-6 years, but eventually 5G will ramp up again, and might even reach LTE's growth levels by 2031.
• Second, there is extreme variance among the projections from different analysts. In the most extreme case, there is a 20x difference between the estimates. Thus, we can conclude that predicting the future is, which should not be surprising, very difficult. In general, this, as also indicated by the high error bars in our figures, would seem to suggest that we should take any 5G growth predictions with a pretty huge grain of salt.

See also our earlier blog posts titled "Risks and Challenges for 5G" and "Why Is 5G Needed?".

References

[1] 5G Forecasts – The Past, Present and Future: 2008 – 2039 (Starting from LTE), http://edge-of-cloud.blogspot.fi/2017/06/5g-forecasts-past-present-and-future.html

[2] What are confidence intervals? http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/prc/section1/prc14.htm