Growing demand for broadband telephony. According to a new report from the electronic equipment manufacturer, Ericsson, mobile data traffic will increase 15-fold worldwide over the next six years. Data traffic via smart phones should thus be equivalent to that of PCs and tablet by 2017. The report, entitled “On the Pulse of the Networked Society”, identifies the universal demand for mobility as the main trend. This development is essentially due to the growing needs to be connected anywhere at any time, as well as the use of video services, cloud computing and the internet, not to mention connectivity from machine to machine. Ericsson predicts that smartphone subscribers will rise from 500 megaoctets (106) of data consumed each month to two gigaoctets (109) by 2017. Over the same period, consumers will use 8 gigaoctets compared to 2 today on PCs or tablets. In western Europe, fewer than 1% of the 540 million mobile subscriptions were for broadband in 2011 and the proportion should increase without exploding over the next six years, to close to 25%. 3G technology will be accessible to 85% of the population in 2017, and three billion more people should benefit from mobile access by then, i.e. nine billion clients. Half of the world's population will, by 2017, be covered by the LTE/4G networks. The number of subscriptions for smartphones should be close to three billion in 2017 compared to 700 million in 2011. In its report, Ericsson also underlines the variations that exist between countries and regions. China has notched up the most new mobile subscriptions, with 39 million in the first quarter 2012, followed by India with 25 million of new subscriptions. The Asia-Pacific region recorded 93 million subscriptions and Africa 30 million. Western Europe accounted for 540 million mobile subscriptions during the first quarter of 2012. There is expected to be a further 100 million by end 2017. The number of mobile data LTE subscriptions is expected to go from under 1% in 2011 to nearly 25% in the region by 2017. (IL/transl.jl)