New Delhi, June 14 (IANS): Fuelled by fast smartphone adoption, changing users' behaviour and disruptive pricing strategies, the data traffic per smartphone user in India will reach 11GB per month by 2022, communications technology and services provider Ericsson forecast on Wednesday.

According to the "Ericsson Mobility Report 2017", the total mobile data traffic in India is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of around 40 per cent, reaching nearly eight exabytes of data per month compared to around one exabytes of data consumption by the end of 2016. 

By 2022, 97 per cent of mobile data traffic will be smartphone traffic.

"As new apps continue to emerge and usage behaviour evolves, network performance will play an even bigger role in determining smartphone users' loyalty towards their operators. In fact, mobile broadband experience in India is five times more effective in driving loyalty than tariff structure and pricing," said Nitin Bansal, Head of Network Products, Ericsson India, in a statement. 

GSM remained the dominant technology in 2016, accounting for over 70 per cent of total mobile subscriptions. LTE and WCDMA/HSPA technologies together are expected to represent 85 per cent of all Indian subscriptions by 2022 while 5G subscriptions are forecast to become available only in 2022 -- representing 0.2 per cent of total mobile subscriptions reaching three million. 

As of 2016, there were 23 million cellular IoT connections and by 2022, this is estimated to reach 191 million. 

"Driving this growth is the government's 'Digital India' vision, focus on 'Smart Cities', new use cases for IoT and the launch of 5G," the findings showed.

VoLTE subscriptions are projected to reach 4.6 billion by the end of 2022. By this time, the VoLTE subscriber base in India is pegged at 370 million . 

"VoLTE represents a great opportunity for telecom operators in India who are looking to route voice calls over 4G LTE networks enabling lower cost per minute for voice calls as well as free up legacy spectrum bands for re-farming," added Bansal.