Despite the significant numbers--266 million new subscriptions across Asia between 2019 and 2025--the growth rate has slowed from its torrid rates of the last couple of decades. That is an illustration of the product lifecycle in communications, where suppliers must continually reinvent themselves, creating new products to sell as legacy products mature.
The other obvious example is that mobile internet access has taken the growth mantle from mobile voice. Over the 2019 to 2025 period, according to the GSMA, about 700 million mobile internet accounts will be added, more than double the number of mobile voice accounts.
Looming beyond mobile internet is the question of “what comes next?” and at such scale that any next-wave product can rival or surpass the revenue earned from mobile services.
Right now, we only have inklings of many partial answers. Consumer video entertainment, smart watches, artificial reality or virtual reality appliances, internet of things sensors or edge computing are touted as new opportunities.
But the big unanswered question is whether there is any one killer app big enough to replace half of all existing mobile revenue within about 10 years.
Unique mobile subscriptions in Asia will grow about six percent between 2019 and 2025, boosting adoption from about 66 percent to 70 percent, according to the GSMA. Use of discrete subscriber information modules (accounts) will grow from 103 percent of the population up to 109 percent.
Mobile broadband subscriptions will grow from 48 percent to 61 percent over the same period.
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