back to article LTE will catch up with 3G by 2020: Ericsson

Here comes 5G, except for one thing: most of the world will still be on pre-4G by 2020. That's the conclusion of research by Ericsson, which finds that today's 7.1 billion mobile subscriptions are dominated by GSM/Edge services. By 2020, the biggest slice of the world's 9.2 billion services will be the 3.8 billion WCDMA/GSM …

  1. Christian Berger

    Hmm, that depends

    My guess is that 3G will shrink dramatically, as it's not very good for data and won't work well with LTE. IoT devices currently are overwhelmingly on GSM, and Internet will quickly move to LTE as soon as operators open their networks to the general public.

    GSM will still be around in the long term as it's seen as infrastructure. It also can work easily with LTE, so you can have a combined LTE GSM base station sharing the same frequency. And that might in fact be used for voice in the long run.

    If people get VoLTE to run on a larger scale, it'll probably enslave humanity and send back a robot from the future to kill the mother of the leader of the anti VoLTE resistance, or it'll just crash and burn and slowly disappear from marketing brochures.

    1. ToddR

      Re: Hmm, that depends

      Para 3, yawn

    2. leexgx

      Re: Hmm, that depends

      IoT tend to use 2G as its free to use and rock solid hardly ever falls over

      3G and 4G small cost to using it and is more complicated for the chinese to implement and not as stable as 2G (3G can stall as well)

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