Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson (publ) (ERICB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, good day, and good evening depending on what region from the world you are calling in from. Welcome to this webinar about Ericsson Mobility Report November 2023 Edition. My name is Peter Johnson, and I am the Executive Editor of the Mobility Report. And with me today, I have a few esteemed colleagues, Stephen Davis, who is the Marketing Director for Ericsson and also part of the content team for Mobility Report. Joining us is also Nitin Bansal, Managing Director, Ericsson India, who will talk about the really interesting case that we have in this division about Jio 5G SA deployment, which is a important part of the digitalization of India. So what do we have in this addition that could catch your attention? Well, as normal, it's a very fully packed addition with 40 pages of forecast, features and feature articles. In comparison with the June addition, we have extended the forecast period up to 2029. The previous forecast period went up to 2028. So we have some new numbers looking out to the approaching time of 2030 time frame. So I will go through a bit about what we see in the highlights of subscriptions and traffic and so forth. Apart from the forecast section, we also have a few recurring topics and some new ones that we want to highlight. Of course, we are tracking the 5G devices development in terms of what kind of new types of features and functionality that is supported in the handsets and in the networks that will support a better performance or some new type of capabilities in the network. In the IoT space, we know that, of course, next year that we will have the reduced capability 5G and our devices coming to market. It is already available in the software for the networks, but we are waiting for the devices to come. And we are certain that this technology will expand the broadband IT possibilities. So we're looking into that as well in this addition. As usual, we have a regional outlook and looking a bit closer into one of our regions. This time, we have chosen to take a look at sub-Sahara and Africa. A very exciting market with very different markets across the whole region. So here, both 4G and 5G are really important components of the technology that is being deployed still in this area. And furthermore, we are also taking a look and updating our forecast on how we see the ICT sector's footprint in terms of carbon actually is stabilizing despite we have more subscribers and data usage coming into the networks. So there is also some exciting findings in that part. Furthermore, we have three main feature articles. And we spend about 80% of our time indoors. So we thought why not take a look actually what is the situation in different types of ends and use places when it comes to connectivity. So the first feature article is demand for indoor connectivity driving the need for enhanced performance. And my colleague, Steven will talk more about that specific article and the content we have in a couple of minutes. Another hot topic is, of course, 5G for enterprises or industries. Here, we are looking into the 5G enabler in giga factories and green steel plants. And 5G is actually an enabler for a new type of connectivity and new type of flexibility in greenfield factories that can make use of the capabilities in terms of latency, speeds and flexibility of the system actually. And this is also something Stephen will talk about. And also, we also have an article written together with the customer, which is something we do in all editions of the Mobility Report. And this time, we have a really interesting case in terms of looking into the large-scale 5G stand-alone deployment in India, which is taking place as we are speaking. So very exciting I think, I think, and you will hear more about that. But let's first take a look about what is happening in terms of subscriptions uptake and traffic development throughout different regions and on a global play. When it comes to 5G, we have seen a strong uptake of subscriptions during the whole of 2023. Actually, when we look at the net addition of 5G subscriptions for 2023, it's a 63% growth compared to 2022. And this is despite quite some challenging macroeconomical situations in many countries and also some, of course, geopolitical disturbance in different regions. Anyway, we are adding about 600 million 5G subscriptions in 2023. But the growth is not equal in all regions. There are four regions that is really answering for around 80% of all the subscriptions growth in 2023. And that is China, India, North America and Western Europe. China, taking about 1/3 of the net addition growth in 5G subscriptions with an impressive 200 million subscriptions since 2023. India with 120 million in just a year after launch of 5G services in October 2022. So what is driving the uptick in China and India? But the commonality here is that they are building -- and China have, of course, been in the forefront here compared to India as they launched earlier, but they are building ubiquitous coverage throughout the country in a very fast and large-scale way. So with China now reaching over 95% coverage of population and India reaching also the similar type of population coverage in just 1 year. That, of course, means that people have access to the network if they buy a handset that are 5G-enabled and a suitable subscription. Furthermore, of course, the handset is driving this because there are more models coming to market. We have 240 new 5G smartphone models released just this year. adding up to a total of 1,000 smartphone models 5G-enabled total on the market since the 2019 launch. This means, of course, that there are more handsets in the lower price segment and different flavors for consumers to choose from and that is driving the uptake. North America, 90 million, a very strong uptick as well. This is primarily also handset driven because of the cyclic period of upgrading your phone actually and then you get a 5G handset and you start communicating on that. Western Europe is also falling with 72 million. So it's definitely very much concentrated to this growing regions actually. What -- how does this play out then? Well, it means that we actually already are at 60% or 61% of 5G subscription penetration in North America, which is then the highest penetration region in the world. Northeast Asia is falling with 41%. And another comment you can make on the subscription penetration is, of course, at India in just 1 year has reached already 11%, which is very much impressive, of course. We have 5G growth in all regions, but it's, of course, not equally played out as you see. And in the end, we will, in 2029 time frame have North America and the Gulf and the Northeast Asian region to have the highest penetration of 5G at that time. On the left-hand side of this slide, you can see also that there will still be quite a substantial amount of 2G and 4G subscriptions still around at the end of the forecast period. And of course, there will be migration from 2G to 3G, 4G and 5G from this subscriber base, which will also drive the global traffic throughout the world. So what I mentioned here is population coverage is, of course, important to have an uptake of subscription. And we have, of course, always reported the total population coverage, but started to look specifically at the 5G mid-band population coverage, a couple of additions back. And we see movement there. 5G mid-band coverage is up from 10% to 30% in 2023. Naturally, India, which is a very populous country is part of that reason because they have deployed, as I said, in a very fast way, up to 90% population coverage in just 1 year. But there's also some movement in markets in Europe, where we have seen also several mid-band deployments during the year. which adds up to the 30% mid-band coverage. However, if you compare, for example, Europe with all the other regions, there is a quite large difference between the total 5G coverage and 5G mid-band coverage. So we can still say that there's a fair amount of 5G deployments that needs to take place, and we see that at least only 40% or 30%, I mean, 30% of the existing 4G sites has been upgraded to 5G SA and 5G mid-band. So there's definitely more room for filling out the coverage and the capacity holds with the mid-band technology. So that was mobile subscriptions, consumer mobile subscriptions, it doesn't include the IoT, IoT connections. I don't have a slide on this here, but we don't see a very large moment in type of changes in uptake and so forth. We are at around 3 billion IoT, cellular IoT connections and forecast that to pass 6 billion at the end of the forecast period in 2029. It's very much still in Asia Pacific-driven market, where most of the connections, 2/3 of the connections are actually installed for different type of purposes. But if you look at fixed wireless access, fixed wireless access, has, of course, notable the primary use cases, if you say so, for 5G in this initial phase. If you compare like we do on this slide here, the previous forecast that went up to 2028 that was published in June addition and compared with our forecast 2029 you can quite quick see that we haven't changed the forecast in terms of amount of connections in the outer years or even now for the closest year. We only see that in 2029, there will still be growth in the market. And then with the trend of 5G coming gradually more and more being the dominant technology will also prevail in the 2029 year. So now by the end of 2023, we estimate that there are around 35 million 5G FWA connections globally. It has been fueled and will be fueled more by India, which has high ambition among all the operators there to address the residential markets and also the small business market. with the fixed wireless access through 5G. But it's not only India and those other countries in Northeast Asian and Southeast Asian region. It's also -- we see movements in other markets. So actually, AT&T service provider in emerging markets have launched 5G FWA during 2023. Including Brussel and Nigeria, which are highly populated countries. So all this and -- all is the ground for our estimate of the uptake of FWA connection in the future. Naturally, we see that we, of course, will be a positive cycle in terms of driving down prices for CPEs that support FWA. So that will entice more and more market segments in different regions of the world. So still a very positive outlook for FWA, according to our analysis. So subscription is one thing, but about traffic then. They go hand in hand, of course, to some extent, and this is our traditional slide showing the global network data traffic development from 2016 up to Q3 this year. And we still have a substantial growth in terms of traffic. Year-over-year growth is 33%. This includes both mobile data traffic and fixed wireless access traffic. But will this growth continue? As you can see from this slope, we have a sloping slope, so to speak. And if we actually look at the second derivative of the mathematical growth curve, that is the year-over-year growth curve actually mapped out on the left-hand side here. You can see then that we have split it out on different regions. And the trend is similar in all regions. We have 20%, 30% year-over-year growth to expect in the closest year from now on up to 2025 time frame, and then the outer year of these forecast period in 2029, it will be sub 20% growth in most of the regions. So why is that? And what does that mean? I mean, it doesn't mean that we have less net added traffic. So on the right-hand side, you see the other coin -- side of the coin, with the mapped out net addition to traffic to the total traffic for each year then. So it means that we have more incremental to the outer part of the forecast period where we see it is stagnating somewhat. And why is it growing? And what are the main reasons for that. Well, part, of course, is that we always have 2G and 3G subscribers worldwide still that haven't changed to 4G and 5G. So a large part of that base, we, of course, expect to migrate even to 4G and 5G. And by migrating to new technology with new handsets, better performance, -- that means that, on average, there will be a higher consumption just by that. Then as you see now the year where we have some 20% growth, even though the number of subscribers sort of migrating because we -- most of the people will have addressable market will have phones at that time. That is the growth that still will continue because we see from history that each year, everybody is consuming more 15% scale. So that will still be there. What we have not included is the extra service contribution in out forecast year here. So this forecast is just looking at the growth factors that we see now. But if extra services will take off in the outer years in a scale way, there would be a substantial upside in terms of growth in the outer year. So if we move year-over-year growth and net additions, if we look at the total, this is how it looks then in terms of mobile data traffic and fixed wireless access traffic. The yellow and the orange ones are depicting the mobile traffic and the purple one is the fixed wireless access traffic. Here we can see that fixed wireless access traffic, which is typically 10x more than average mobile data consumption, it's already 20% of the total traffic actually. And it will grow to have a share around 30% of all traffic in 2029. So the net added that we saw on the previous slide will add up to around 3x more traffic in 2029 of mobile data compared to 2023. But I want to point out again that this is -- there is only initial uptake of extra type of services that is modeled into the traffic growth here in the outer years. But if that will substantially change, we will, of course, adjust our forecast and see how that will play out when that market really takes off. Well, Ericson Mobility Report is not just about subscriptions and traffic and those regularly published forecast. We also look into some networks to see and observe interesting things that could shed some lights on some aspects of mobile communication. And in this addition, we thought it was interesting to look into some networks on the difference between what traffic shares different type of traffic has in a downlink and what share of traffic is most common in the uplink in a selected number of 4G 5G networks. And this is what the graph on the left-hand side shows here four different operators and the share of traffic in downlink and in uplink, respectively. And on average, if we take these networks and a couple of more we looked into, the uplink share of traffic or the total traffic is around 8%. It hasn't changed over the years on general note. But of course, it is very different from place to place. And we will look into that a bit later in the indoor connectivity article because depending on what venue or location you are at the uplink part could be, of course, more than 8%. But what stands out here, of course, is that we see some more red colors in the uplink and some more yellow color depicting then that the share of communication and cloud storage services are more common in the -- or higher in the uplink, which is a bit expected. If you then would compare the same kind of traffic volumes, the cloud storage service, of course, then seems that most users are uploading and down on a similar kind of amount of data from different services and so forth. But there are more details on this that you can dwell into -- in that feature article. If we move on and look at -- this is a slide we typically have had and follow, looking at 310 different operators and their mobile service packages and offerings. We see a continued trend here, as you can see, for the November bar, which is on the right-hand side in the -- each of the collection of bars, you can say, that there are still more operators attaching to 5G. I think there are 40 more service providers in the world compared to June. And we also see that there are actually a sort of a stronger uptake in the triple and quad play offerings bucket there, which we believe is a consequence of more 5G deployments and you have better capacity and you start bundling more and you add media packages to your triple play offering. So that seems to be a trend coming. What we did difference this time is we looked a bit into the difference between those operators that have 5G offerings and those that have a non-offering or 4G offering, I would say the -- is there any changes? Or are there any differences in the way they are offering services. And one thing that stuck out quite substantially is that there are more 5G service providers that have added an unlimited data plan to their range of data plans, existing data plans compared to 4G service providers, which still have a tier plan staggered up to maybe a substantial amount of 50 or 100 gigabytes, but not unlimited. This could, of course, be explained by the 5G capacity and efficiency, more cost efficient to deliver data bits and also to extend your offering within unlimited offerings, where you maybe are bundling with different types of media packages or other high-end services to create more premium services. Similar actually amount, which I already mentioned, then the 60% of 5G service providers have multi-play offerings with media packages added compared to just 30% of those with only 4G offerings. So I think those things goes hand-in-hand. The only point where we saw actually reach a difference in sort of where there was a higher percentage for service price with 4G, which is related to service-based connectivity packages. Service base connectivity packages could be a [indiscernible] or gigabyte per month or gigabyte-per-day kind of package where you get [ rated ] for a category of different apps like video, music and so. And this has been more commonly used among 4G service providers than 5G service providers, which we then believe is also sort of a consequence of moving to more differentiated and more wide range of plans for the 5G operators with unlimited and you don't have to play around with that, you play around with the different types of service plans in terms of data package duration and so. So that was a run-through from the forecast part of the report. And so Steven, let's take a closer looking to the indoor part than what I mentioned about uplink and so forth. And what do you see indoor, where we are spending most of our time.

So as you say, we're spending large amount of our time indoor. Yet so far, the majority of 5G has been deployed at outdoor macro sites to provide coverage and capacity for mobile broadband and fixed wireless access services, yet it's estimated around 80% of traffic is generated indoors. And when we're looking at why indoor is so important, there was a recent Ericsson consumer lab study that highlighted the correlation between network performance in key locations and service provider churn. So the research found that users who encountered connectivity problems at event venues and airports were 3x more likely to churn in the next 6 months to really showing the importance of addressing indoor connectivity for users. In this article, we're going to take the -- some data samples that have been taken in North America that were retrieved across nine different venue types there was 30 samples of mobile data traffic taken per venue type, and this is from indoor deployments from across the three different networks in quarter 1, 2023. And all of the indoor deployments that we've got here were 4G except one 5G sample? So if we dive into the data, one of the things with indoor venues is they typically have a high concentration of users in a limited area making the capacity demand extremely high during peak periods. If we look at the figure on the left here, then this shows the relative average traffic per user in the indoor venues normalized with outdoor dense urban traffic. And the results show that in the busy venues, peak traffic per user is 1.5x to 2x higher on average. And we've even got something there in the airports where it was up 3x higher that usage per user on average compared to dense urban. And as you said, Peter, looking into the proportion of uplink traffic. And if you look on the slide -- the chart on the right-hand side, you can actually see that in many cases, the actual uplink traffic is significantly higher at the indoor venues than it is to that dense urban benchmark that we've got. But we also see considerable variation in uplink traffic. So if we look at maybe a couple of the examples as we've got stadiums and hotels. So within the stadium as example, we know that during one major sporting event, then the uplink traffic was at 40% in that stadium. And that's kind of going to be driven by the social media sharing. So we can kind of see that and we can relate that to the sort of uplink services that we saw earlier. But interestingly, within hotels, where we see quite a big variation as well, then that's very dependent on the location of hotel, type of guests, time of the week. And that being that, that drives different types of services being used. So if we think about work-related applications, cloud storage, e-mail, then you're driving sort of quite a lot of uplink traffic there, video call, social media as well. And then you'll have a enough direct stream at different times of day or different users where you've got very heavy downlink traffic that would be driven by video streaming and particularly high-definition video streaming services. So again, understanding the traffic profiles can help think about the types of solutions that are required? And one of the things as we said, relating to the study that was in the [ consumer line ] is also understanding what is the indoor user experience. And can we see if that's being compromised at all? So the chart on the left, we actually take a deep analysis into the indoor radio resource utilization. And what we can say is if the resource utilization is below 50%, then we know there's going to be a good user experience. However, as it rises above 50%, we start to see a degrading in the user experience. And the chart here highlights the proportion of venues with high resource utilization. So typically, stadiums do better because they've seen more investment in indoor solutions. As you can see, many venues are at this high resource utilization, I think the highest we saw was around 90% in one of the data samples. And then on the chart on the right-hand side, One of the key metrics for measuring user experience is time to content and in a separate Ericsson smartphone lab study. results indicated a strong relationship between the available downlink throughput and the time to content. And with time to content scale, we can derive for throughput that would be required to meet certain targets. And what you see here in the blue is showing an excellent experience, the green, good, orange, fair, and red, poor. And obviously, if you look across the chart here, there's a lot of red and orange showing that a lot of poor to fair experience is a typical indoor experience, sort of showing how user experience is compromised with the solutions today, and therefore, the need to improve indoor coverage. And one example that we've got kind of showing how that improvement can be brought is by the introduction of 5G bands. So Optus is a good example where they upgraded free stadiums in support for recent major women's football tournament, where they introduced 5G bands to enhance the event experience for the fans. And some of the key stats from that event, a 0.75 million fans attended the stadiums across the live event, generated over 29 terabytes of traffic of which 57% was 5G and 25% of that traffic was Uplink, which kind of aligns with the major sporting event in the U.S., where we saw that very high level of Uplink traffic? And when they were measuring the success of bringing the 5G balance to the stadiums, the key performance indicator was kind of measuring the accessibility. And in this case, it was greater than 99% in both 4G and 5G. And this was also achieved with the support of around 7,000 live changes optimizing the cell sites throughout the event. And this helped also drive an improvement in Uplink that ranged from 5% to 53% compared to a sort of match at the event prior to the network upgrades. So again, being able to manage the additional uplink pressure on the network. And then one of the -- kind of things that we see when looking at which solutions should be deployed. We know that the indoor deployments are dominated by the DAS systems today, the Distributed Antenna Systems. But when we've looked at indoor small cells, we can actually see that they're able to provide significant improvements in both uplink and downlink. So the downlink in the chart on the left, the uplink in the chart on the right. And this significant improvement, particularly at the cell edge, there can make a big difference in terms of that time to content that we looked at earlier and driving the user experience, which when we go full circle back to the consumer lab study and understanding that correlation between network performance and churn. It kind of shows the importance of addressing indoor and choosing the right solution so that you can support the requirements that needed there? And also by improving that uplink performance that also paves a way for new immersive services as well in the future. So staying indoor, but moving to the industrial cases and looking at private networks. Then one of the things that we've seen is that the joint importance of renewable energy and decarbonization have triggered a wave of global investment in sustainable manufacturing and production processes. So as Peter said at the start, gigafactories are very large manufacturing sites that were pioneered to rapidly increase the scale of production of electric vehicles, batteries and clean technologies. And we've also got green steel plants that are preparing to decarbonize the production process. And one of the challenges is looking at both scale and agility, which can be competing requirements. So gigafactories require both incredibly large scale as well as agility. The scale is often achieved with high levels of automation, which is typically kind of been done or traditionally been done as hardwired automation. And the minute something becomes hard wired, you limit the reconfiguration that you can do on the factory floor. And we have one example with gigafactories looking at around 300 layout changes to the factory floor per year. So this could be things from setting up a new test station to align with production capacity, making improvements to the production line to optimize the economics, change the placement of materials and have the flexibility to accommodate new product mixes or bring in personalization. So you kind of see the types of agility that are needed. And the gigafactories to achieve these optimum efficiencies. They need that agility across the equipment, the machinery, the tools and the workers all across the shop floor. So to find a solution that retains both dimensions of scale and agility, the manufacturing industry and especially these greenfield gigafactories have been exploring the technology options and kind of see the need for a robust wireless connection to support these requirements. And as I said about the size of these gigafactories. So a typical manufacturing shop floor may reach up to 100,000 square meters. Whereas when we look at a gigafactory floor space, this can be more than 5x larger than that. So therefore, the 5G networks is one of the key things I've been looking at, is the ability to build out this large area coverage. And the small cells that are deployed with the 5G network, we need around 8x to 10x fewer of those compared to WiFi access points to meet the coverage requirements. And furthermore, one of the important areas with the agility is having the seamless mobility. And with the WiFi networks have been tested, the handover can bring in interruptions to traffic and those interruptions for some use cases are unacceptable. An example of that can be the automated guided vehicles. And this is making 5G the ideal wireless technology for these new gigafactories and also manufacturing plants as a whole. And then if we have a look at the decarbonization of green steel, then ArcelorMittal in France is a global leader in steel and mining. And they've got very active programs around decarbonizing the steel production process. And the company targets a 35% reduction in their CO2 emissions in Europe by 2030. And to be carbon neutral by 2050. And they see that the 4G, 5G private networks can play a key role in this. And starting in the main factory in Dunkirk, they've launched their 5G -- green 5G steel with Orange business services. And the key reason that we're choosing the 4G and 5G were the extensive coverage, so the same as we saw in the Gigafactories. So they've got large areas to cover, but they've also got complex industrial sites that need indoor outdoor areas to be covered. Some of it is underneath high-rise metal structures and the mobile solutions, support that type of coverage requirement. And then the low latency with 5G is enabling them to deploy autonomous vehicles and also remote control of cockpits in the sort of high-risk areas in the mining cases. And then the other area that's very important to them is data security, so ensuring that the private mobile network protects their sensitive industrial data. So that's a view on kind of some of the reasons why 5G is playing a key role in helping decarbonize industries and also helping bring scale and agility in gigafactories. So I'd now like to hand over to Nitin Bansal to take us through the co-written article with Jio looking at large-scale 5G assay deployments.

I'm Nitin Bansal. And as a partner to Reliance Jio, I'm really very proud to be presenting the successes we have had in India with the launch of 5G and how the overall digitalization and digital transformation has happened in India. So if you look at last 12 months, India has seen the fastest 5G rollout. It's a massive deployment with more than 380,000 5G BTSs in the last 12 months. and the services were launched in October 2022. So we have the spectrum auction in July. The spectrum was allocated, the 5G services launched. And then in the last 12 months, we have seen a huge rollout. The other highlight for India 5G deployment is related to massive MIMO. We have deployed 100% massive MIMO network on the mid-band for a true 5G user experience and superior performance. And in addition, with the launch, we have seen rollout of our availability of different services, starting with the enhanced mobile broadband, then fixed wireless access was launched. And we expect to continue to see new services being launched in India to drive the future data demands. So if you go back a few years and look at how the journey for Reliance Jio was for 4G. When Jio launched the network for 4G, that was 100% 4G LTE wireless broadband network with more than 100,000 mobile towers. And what it resulted then was a substantial growth in data consumption by the consumers within 5, 6 months of the launch. When it comes to 5G, I said that we launched the services in India in October 2022. Reliance Jio adopted a pure 5G stand-alone architecture from day 1, which is actually the first one globally. So Reliance Jio is a global pioneer in adopting 5G stand-alone architecture from the very beginning. In the last 12 months, almost 1 million cells have been deployed. So if you calculate, it's about one 5G cell every 10 seconds. That's the speed of the rollout. And in the last 12 months, we have seen around 95%-plus population coverage in the last 12 months for 5G. Then Jio as a disruptor of Indian mobile services industry. Like I said, I mean, Jio rolled out the world's fastest and largest nationwide mid-band 5G network outside China. And this is as on day, which is the end of 2023. The deployments happened on 5G stand-alone on mid-band spectrum and together with carrier aggregation. So this is the first time that any network has been launched with 5G SA, 100% massive MIMO and mid-band and carrier replication. And the waste deployment was possible to be done in India was it was basically planning ahead, right? So infrastructure upgrade, which has made a strengthening of the towers and power requirements and so on. Fiberization, the news of e-bank for making sure the backhaul is ready and also UV, which is the unlicensed band radio for backhaul. So preparedness from -- before deployment started was the key. And then when it comes to the data traffic Jio has experienced 29% year-over-year growth in the consumption. And as we speak today, we see that the monthly data consumption is approximately 26.6 gigabyte per month per user. And this is the data from July to September 2023. Now Jio alone has contributed about 85% of overall 5G capacity in the country. And what has this resulted in? About more than 70 million subscribers have been migrated to 5G. 5G has been deployed by India. So the population coverage, which I spoke about, which is more than 95%, that was critical for mass adoption. And hence, with 150,000 5G sites in both 700 and 3.5 gigahertz bands and 8,000 towns covered. So a huge population coverage, massive deployments, good subscriber uptake, which resulted in what we see today is about 1.5 exabytes of 5G traffic in the network or Jio in India. And if you look at the trend in the last 6 years, we have seen a growth of more than 10 times. And again, the enablers for this strong growth is nationwide deployment for 5G stand-alone network as making sure that the ecosystem is in place to support the 5G stand-alone architecture in terms of device support. We also see that the share of premium devices in the Jio network is increasing consistently. And again, the wideband deployment of -- the wide deployment of 5G stand-alone on mid-band spectrum and carrier aggregation has given substantive growth in the data conversion. So what are the factors which Jio considers as for success and critical for 5G update? One is building ubiquitous 5G coverage. Which is providing high speed and low latency connectivity to the consumers. So that was ubiquitous coverage was as a result of mass deployment across pan India that I spoke about more than 8,000 towns and cities and massive deployments and then also implementing dynamic network slicing. So delivering immersive experiences. So for example, for fixed private access and other services. So it is about making the services acailable to the consumers in terms of high quality, good coverage and options for data growth. And that's what resulted in 10x growth of data traffic in the past 6 years. Now this is just a sample of how the picture changed in India with 5G stand-alone test samples. So what you see here is comparison between October 2022, where -- which is where the 5G departments in India started April and September. And in September, what we -- September '23, what we see is India is practically turning with 5G SA test outputs. Then when it comes to the performance, and this is the darker, the shade of green, the higher speed that is available to the subscribers. This is again a comparison from October to September 23, where we see that India is turning almost to the darker shades of green , which is closer to 200 Mbps prevailing what they speeds available in the network. Then Jio also introduced 5G fixed wireless access services. It was launched in six of the main cities, sorry. And this was launched in September. And for eight cities, now it's available all across. The ambition is to reach 100 million households to 56 wireless access, which is also called DOA fiber. The strategy is to deploy or using the outdoor customer premise equipment, which is multi-tenancy. So one city connects to multiple households. And it is in-house production and sourcing of CPEs, which is happening as we speak from the ecosystem in India. And we also see that there is a strong revenue growth potential for Indian telcos with the 5G-based fixed wireless access services because there is less fiberization and low wireline broadband penetration in. So this is a service which -- the ambition is 100 million households, and we see that the trends already are looking very positive to reaching that number. In addition, Jio also launched the virtual reality headset. The highlights of this is that it works both on Android and iOS, opening system, it costs less than $16. And this was launched in May '23, with good amount of success. Next steps, Reliance Jio is working on an augmented reality device, which will be used across consumer and enterprise segments. And this was demonstrated in the Indian Mobile Congress, which we -- which is -- which happens every year in India. So we see that 5G is definitely set to drive the next leg of growth in India, and this is specifically talking about Reliance Jio in this slide. So -- the only way to get market share gain is to have network leadership and network leadership is both in terms of deployment, ubiquitous coverage and good performance. We also -- it is also expected that the ARPU will get uplifted based on enhanced video experience. So one is the eMBB part, then we have the fixed wireless access part and then the video and all the other services that come with it. Then in a fiber, which is the fixed wireless access solution from Reliance Jio. This will be used both in homes and small and medium businesses. And obviously, it's about deploying a platform solution at scale for enterprises. Because enterprises is that there's a mixed area where enterprises can definitely benefit for seamless 5G connectivity, which is reliable, secure and provide good quality of service.

So thank you very much, Nitin. It's really interesting case to hear about Jio and how they are thinking about the strategy to really catch the interest of both consumers and enterprises with 5G stand-alone deployment. So let's go for a couple of questions that has arrived. We start with two questions related to the report as such.

As you may have seen, we -- you are now able to download a copy of the presentation in PDF. So please do that. Of course, we will have all the material from the report and report itself on our website as well on ericsson.com and related to that, that's the question about the data points in the report and is there any spreadsheet of the data available. And actually we have a tool on the on the ericsson.com ,which is called Ericsson Mobility visualizer, which contains all the data points for all our forecasts from 2015 up to 2029. And you can export that data, you can cut it in different regions and in different technologies and export it to Excel or make [indiscernible] out of it as well. So please utilize all the data sets that we have sort of in that tool. Moving on to some questions related to the part of what we have presented. We have a question here. When you say 5G, does this include NSA and SA question mark, what do you see happening with SA only? Well, of course, it's still so that the majority of the network deployed in total 280 -- from 20, 40 networks, it's a bit more than 40 that has deployed a stand-alone at present time when we are talking. And the prime examples are India, Jio case, which is from start deploying the assay as Nitin was talking about. But also China, which has decommissioned all these and already have SA enabled base stations and go fully out for SA. Remember, these two markets are the ones with the highest subscription uptake pace and growth and they are from start really having both the national agenda and the digitalization transformation agenda to -- supported by 5G, which is why they have chosen to go for 5G assay from the beginning to really enable all the capabilities with ultra-low latency and network slicing capabilities that comes with 5G SA. So we expect that more and more operators will go for that architecture. The reason for why many went for NSA in the beginning is, of course, the cost of the installed base and the architecture at the time when 5G came around in 2019 and also availability of spectrum and so forth, which played in the favor for support for 5G assay. But we are definitely sure that to really utilize the 5G capabilities, you need to have 5G assay. So more and more we go for that. And we see, of course, more operators both in Southeast Asia and in Europe now and in U.S. coming with more and more assay deployments. There's a question here about traffic data, our mobile data traffic forecast and so traffic data is uplink and downlink combined, I assume question mark, do you have figures on split between uplink and downlink and respective growth? I think this question was posted just before we talked about that. But as we said on general note, it's in the network, we see, we don't have, of course, visibility in all where there was network. But in the samples, we make, we see 8% to 10% as a general note in downlink and uplink ratio. And this has been consistent for quite some years now. So it seems that the growth in both uplink and downlink is following each other in terms of volume then. That is what we see. We don't see that uplink is growing faster than downlink in terms of growth there. This will, of course, be interesting to see how it plays out when XR services come, which is more happening heavy and how that share might change in the future. Let's see, yes, there was also another question here related to the uplink, downlink traffic discussion, and that is what is the other category in North America, nearly 50% in the downlink. Yes, we have some limitations in our way of identifying some traffic. So in some of the bars, you see a category record others, which is both a traffic that is not possible to identify because of encryptions and so forth. And also a tail long tail of small applications or small services and e-mails and so forth. But our assumption is that, of course, quite substantial part of the other category is also video. So that is why you see it as a category which is also compromised by a lot of video traffic then. Another question related to traffic here. Do you look at or differentiate between mobile users, IoT and connected vehicles in terms of uplink and downlink analysis? We haven't done that for some time actually. We did a couple of addition ago. We did look at massive IoT narrowband IoT cut down. And what type of traffic and traffic patterns and so forth for real-time applications -- for applications that are -- sorry, not realtime application but real traffic and deployments and saw the different and saw the different steps of this. But that's something we might come back to and see this, of course, will be large difference depending on what kind of IoT device we are talking about and what kind of use cases. But we might come back on that in coming additions, actually. That's a good question. Steve and a question for you here. What about 4G and 5G indoor performance. Is there anything there you can say about the indoor connectivity and how that plays out?

Yes. So I think in the article percentage, as we said, most of the data was 4G, but there was a sample in there on 5G data. And when we looked at that, then you compared with the others of a similar type then we could actually see that the throughput was over double on the downlink and the sell Edge performance on the downlink was around 3x higher. So we could visually see that, that the improvement that 5G would bring. And obviously, we can relate that to the time to content and user experience measure, say, limited 5G deployments, but from the sample we've got, it looks good.

Great. Thanks for that. We have time for one or more, two questions. We have one here related to fixed wireless access. Slides are not reflecting any major growth in fixed wireless access. Only thing that we can see is consumers moving from 4G SBA solution to 5G. This 5G SBA solution not being considered a turn -- considered alternative to wireline broadband program. Well, I will challenge that statement -- I mean, if you look at the total connections from 2023 to 2029, we have a 3x growth in connections in total FWA. And the shift then from 4G To 5G up to 80% share of total number of subscriptions at the end of the forecast period. So there is definitely a growth in number of FWA connections. And yes, it is being replaced in some markets for ADSL or other type of wireline solutions and, of course, where it's cost-efficient to deploy compared to fiber and so. So there are many different types of deployment scenarios where fixed wireless access is actually better than a wireline solution then. It is also interesting to reflect on Jio's deployment here is that they actually use a network slice for the FWA as Nitin also mentioned, and that is to protect the -- protect the FWA users actually not protect the MBB end users because FWA user is generating 4 to 5x more ARPU than the mobile users in the network. Yes. Let's see if we have some more questions here that we have time to answer maybe for you then the last question, Steven. Regarding the example of 5G requiring 8, 10 fewer access points. Is that the benefit that can only really be seen a gigafactory question mark? Or how small could an indoor place be to see this benefit? Maybe it's a trickier question, but is there any reflections around...

I think it can definitely be seen as a benefit in smaller locations. I don't know how small the cutoff point is. But I think the thing that we talked about was one, was obviously the fewer access points, but then it was the interruption in traffic during the handover between access points. So that seamless mobility once that becomes a key factor, so as we used to see example, the automated guided vehicles or these remote cockpits in the green steel plant once that becomes a requirement than the mobile solution is going to be the preferred option to ensure the safety of the operating equipment and their smooth handovers. So I think we -- yes, big sell on the mobility aspects. So once you move up to multiple access points, you've got a benefit there. I don't know from a cost economics, what the cutover point would be.

Okay. Very valid comment on the benefits of 5G is also not only for the gigafactories. That's for sure. Okay, we are running out of time. There are some questions we will try to answer afterwards or send you an email, but thanks a lot for joining this session. And thanks for the good questions. We hope you enjoy the report, and welcome you back in future presentations of the Mobility Report. Have a nice day and evening.