Hans Vestberg (News - Alert), president and CEO of Ericsson, said at Mobile World Congress 2010 today that the company is expecting robust growth in 2010, stemming mainly from the upgrading of carriers’ mobile networks to Long Term Evolution wireless technology, according to a Reuters (News - Alert) report.

Following on a report from the International Telecommunication Union predicting that total global mobile cellular subscriptions will reach 5 billion this year -- up from about 4.6 billion at the end of 2009 -- Vestberg predicted that the total number of mobile subscriptions worldwide will reach 7 billion in five years.

 

'In five years time we are going to have some 7 billion [wireless] subscriptions in the world, because people will have more than one,' Vestberg said during a news conference at Mobile World Congress 2010, now underway Barcelona, Spain, according to the Reuters report. In addition he predicted that within five years there will be about 3 billion mobile broadband subscriptions worldwide.

 

Although Vestberg declined to give a company forecast for 2010, he predicted Ericsson (News - Alert) will see strong growth as a result of the ongoing upgrading of mobile networks to support high speed data services.

 

Most of the company’s growth, he said, will stem from the development of Long Term Evolution wireless technology, which will help wireless operators increase capacity to handle increasing network traffic, and usher in a new wave of advanced mobile communications services such as two-way video communications.

Ericsson has won numerous major contracts to upgrade carrier networks to LTE – but so too have rivals Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, Motorola and Nokia Siemens (News - Alert).

Earlier this month AT&T picked Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent to build its new LTE network in North America, where Ericsson last year purchased the LTE assets of bankrupt telecoms group Nortel (News - Alert).

 

Vestberg said it will be 'a couple of years' before we start seeing subscriptions to high speed wireless services take off – however he pointed out that about 240 million subscribers currently use high-speed networks made by Ericsson.

To read more about what Vestberg said, check out this report on TMCnet.