With me today, I have a few esteemed colleagues, Steve 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 edition about Jio 5G SA deployment, which is a very important part of the digitalization of India. So what do we have in this edition that could catch your attention? Well, as normal, this is a very fully packed edition, with 40 pages of forecast, features, and feature articles. In comparison with the June edition, 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 timeframe.
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 we 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 NR 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 IoT possibilities.
So we're looking into that as well in this edition. 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-Saharan 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 that 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 venues 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, Steve, 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 a 5G-enabled agility in gigafactories 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 Steve will talk about.
We also have an article written together with a 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 Standalone deployment in India, which is taking place as we are speaking. Very exciting, 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 plane. 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.
This is despite quite some challenging macroeconomic 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. 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 one-third of the net addition growth in 5G subscriptions, with an impressive 200 million subscriptions in 2023. India, with 120 million in just the year after the launch of 5G services in October 2022. What is driving the uptake in China and India?
Well, the commonality here is that they are building, and China, of course, being 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 gateway. So with China now reaching over the 95% coverage of population and India reaching also the similar type of population coverage in just one 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 uptake as well. This is primarily also handset-driven because of the cyclic period of upgrading your phone, actually, and then you get the 5G handset and you start communicating on that. Western Europe is also following with 72 million. So it's definitely very much concentrated to these 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 following with 41, and another comment you can make on the subscription penetration is, of course, that India, in just one 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 timeframe, 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.
Of course, there will be migration from 2G to 3G, or 4G and to 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 editions back. And we see a 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 one year.
But there is 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 say, still say that there is 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 is definitely more room for filling out the coverage and the capacity holes with the mid-band technology. So that was mobile subscriptions, consumer mobile subscriptions.
It doesn't include the IoT connections. I don't have a slide on this here, but we don't see a very large movement in type of changes in uptake and so forth. We are at around three 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 an Asia-Pacific driven market, where most of the connections, two-thirds of the connections are actually installed for different type of purposes. But if you look at fixed wireless access, it has, of course, turned out to be 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 and was published in the June edition, and compare 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 the Northeast Asian and Southeast Asian region; it's also, we see movements in other markets. So actually, 18 service providers in emerging markets have launched 5G FWA during 2023, including Brazil and Nigeria, which are highly populated countries. So all this in all is the ground for our estimate of the uptake of FWA connections 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 then 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 what 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. The 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 looked 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 2025-2030 timeframe. And then the outer years of this forecast period in 2028, 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 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 incrementally added traffic throughout the year up 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 sort of reason for that? Well, part, of course, is that we always have, we have almost two billion, two billion 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.
By migrating to a new technology with new handsets, better performance, that means that on average there will be higher consumption per subscription, just by that. Then, as you see now, the year where we have sub-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's consuming more, traffic actually on 10%-15% scale, so that will still be there. What we have not included is the extra service contribution in the outer forecast year here.
So this forecast is just looking at the growth vectors that we see now, but if extra services will take off in the outer years in the scale way, then there will be a substantial upside in terms of growth in the outer years. So if we want to go from this view of 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 data traffic, and the purple one is the fixed wireless access traffic. Here we can see that fixed wireless access traffic, which is typically 10 times more than average mobile data consumption, it's already 20% of the total traffic, actually.
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 three times more traffic in 2029 for mobile data compared to 2023. But I want to point out again that this is, there is only initial uptick 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, the Ericsson Mobility Report is not just about subscriptions and traffic and those regularly published forecasts.
We also look into some networks to see and observe interesting things that, that could shed some light on some aspects of mobile communication. And in this edition, 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 in different regions, and the share of traffic in downlink and in uplink, respectively. And on average, if we take these networks and a couple of more that we looked into, the uplink share of traffic of the total traffic is around 8%.
It hasn't changed over the years on a general note, but of course, it is very different from place to place. 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%. So what stands out here is, of course, 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 uplink 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 it seems that the most users are uploading and downloading 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 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. 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 offerings. That seems to be a trend coming. What we did different this time is we looked a bit into the difference between those operators that have 5G offerings and those that have a non-5G offering or 4G offering, I would say then. Is there any changes, or are there any differences in the way they are offering services?
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 surprisingly, so 4G service providers, which still have a tier plan staggered up to maybe a substantial amount of 50 or 100 GB, but not unlimited. This could, of course, be explained by the 5G capacity and efficiency, more cost efficiency to deliver data bits, and also to extend your offering with an unlimited offerings, where you may be all bundling with different types of media packages or other high-end services to create more premium services.
Similar, actually, amount, which I already mentioned, is 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 which actually a difference in sort of, where there was a higher percentage for service providers with 4G, which is, related to service-based connectivity packages. Service-based connectivity packages could be a video pass or a gigabyte per month, 4 GB per day kind of package, where you get zero rated for a category of different apps like video, music, and so on.
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 a 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 ranges, so. That was a run-through from the forecast part of the report. Steve, let's take a closer look into the indoor part and what I mentioned about uplink and so forth. What do you see in indoor, where we are spending most of our time?
Thank you very much, Peter. So, yeah, as you say, we're spending a large amount of our time indoors, 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 ConsumerLab 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 three times more likely to churn in the next six months. So really showing the importance of, addressing indoor connectivity for users. In this article, we're gonna 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 Q1 2023. 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 demands 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.
The results show that in the busy venues, peak traffic per user is 1.5 to two times higher on average. And we've even got a sample in there in the airports, where it was up to three times higher, that usage per user on average, compared to dense urban. And as you said, Peter, it's looking into the proportion of uplink traffic, and if you look in 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 you look at maybe a couple of the examples there, we've got stadiums and hotels.
So within the stadiums example, we know that during one major sporting event, then the uplink traffic was at 40% in that stadium, and that's kinda gonna be driven by the social media sharing. 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 guest, time of the week, and that drives different types of services being used. If we think about work-related applications, cloud storage, email, then you're driving so quite a lot of uplink traffic there, video calls, social media as well.
And then you'll have another extreme at different times of the 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 to consider, as we said, relating to the study that was done in the ConsumerLab, 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 deeper 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 gonna 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. But as you can see, many venues are at this high resource utilization, and 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 the time to content scale, we can derive the throughput that would be required to meet certain targets.
What you see here is the blue is showing an excellent experience, the green, good, orange, fair, and red, poor. Obviously, if you look across the chart here, there's a lot of red and orange showing that a poor to fair experience is a typical indoor experience. So sort of showing how user experience is compromised with the solutions today, and therefore, the need to improve indoor coverage. 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 three stadiums in support for recent major women's football tournament, where they introduced 5G bands to enhance the event experience of the fans.
Some of the key stats from that event say 750,000 fans attended the stadiums across the live event, generated over 29 TB of traffic, of which 37% 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. When they were measuring the success of bringing the 5G bands 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. 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%-53% compared to a sort of match at the event prior to the network upgrades. So again, being able to manage that 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 where 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.
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 up user experience, which when we go full circle back to the ConsumerLab 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 are needed there, and also by improving that uplink performance, that also paves the way for new immersive services as well in the future. 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. We've also got green steel plants. They're preparing to decarbonize the production process. One of the challenges is looking at both scale and agility, which can be competing requirements. G igafactories 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. The minute something becomes hardwired, you limit the reconfiguration, so you can do on the factory floor. 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 ergonomics, change the placement of materials, and have the flexibility to accommodate new product mixes or bring in personalization. So you can kind of see the types of agility that are needed. And for 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 sqm . Whereas when we look at a gigafactory floor space, this can be more than five times larger than that. So therefore, the 5G networks is one of the key things they've been looking at, is the ability to build out this large area coverage and the small cells that are deployed when the 5G network. We need around eight to 10 times fewer of those compared to Wi-Fi 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 Wi-Fi networks, when 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. Then, if we have a look at the decarbonization of green steel, ArcelorMittal in France is a global leader in steel and mining, and they've got very active programs around decarbonizing the steel production process. The company targets a 35% reduction in their CO2 emissions in Europe by 2030, and to be carbon neutral by 2050. They see that the 4G, 5G private networks can play a key role in this. Starting in their main factory in Dunkirk, they've launched their 5G Green, 5G Steel with Orange Business Services. The key reasons they were 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.
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 SA 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 deployments with more than 380,000 5G BTSes in the last 12 months, and the services were launched in October 2022. So we had 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. In addition, with the launch, we have seen rollout of availability of different services, starting with 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, you know, when Jio launched the network for 4G, that was a 100% 4G LTE wireless broadband network with more than 100,000 mobile towers. And what it resulted in was a substantial growth in data consumption by the consumers within five, six months of the launch.
When it comes to 5G, I said that, you know, we launched the services in India in October 2022. Reliance Jio adopted pure 5G Standalone architecture from day one, which is actually the first one globally. So Reliance Jio is a global pioneer in adopting 5G Standalone architecture from the very beginning. In the last 12 months, almost one million 5G cells have been deployed. So if you calculate, it's about 10, one 5G cell every 10 seconds. That's the speed of the rollout. And in the last 12 months, we have seen 95%+ population coverage in the last 12 months for 5G.
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 date, which is the end of 2023. The deployments happened on 5G Standalone, 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 on mid-band and carrier aggregation. And the one of the main reasons why such a huge deployment was possible, to be done in India was, it was basically planning ahead, right? So infrastructure upgrade, which is needed, strengthening of the towers and power requirements and so on.
Fiberization, the use of E-band for, for making sure that the backhaul is ready, and also UBR, which is the unlicensed band radio for backhaul. So preparedness, from before the deployment started was the key. And then when it comes to the data traffic, Jio has experienced a 29% year-over-year growth in the consumption. And as we speak today, we see that the monthly data consumption is approximately 26.6 GB 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 pan-India, so you know, 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 GHz 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 for Jio in India. And if you look at the trend in the last six years, we have seen a growth of more than 10 times. And again, the enablers for this strong growth is nationwide deployment for 5G Standalone network. us making sure that the ecosystem is in place to support the 5G Standalone architecture in terms of device support.
We also see that the share of premium devices in the Jio network is increasing consistently. Again, the wideband deployment of 5G Standalone on mid-band spectrum and carrier aggregation has given substantial growth in the data consumption. What are the factors which Jio considers as for success and critical for 5G uptake? One is building ubiquitous 5G coverage, which is providing high speed and low latency connectivity to the consumers. So that was ubiquitous coverage as a result of, you know, 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 to deliver immersive experiences, so for example, for fixed wireless access and other services.
So it is about making the services available to the consumers in terms of high quality, good coverage, and options for data growth, and that's what resulted in 10 times growth of data traffic in the past six years. Now, this is just a sample of how the picture changed in India with 5G Standalone test samples. So what you see here is a comparison between October 2022, which is where the 5G deployments in India started, April and September. And in September, September 2023, what we see is India is practically turning green with 5G SA test samples. Then when it comes to the performance, and this is, you know, the darker the shade of green, the higher the speed that is available to the subscribers.
This is again, a comparison from October to September 2023, where we see that India is turning almost to the darker shades of green, which is closer to 200 Mbps available speeds available in the network. Then Jio also introduced 5G fixed wireless access services. It was launched in eight cities, sorry. And this was launched in September, and for eight cities, and now it's available all across. The ambition is to reach 100 million households through 5G fixed wireless access, which is also called the Jio AirFiber. The strategy is to deploy, we're using the outdoor customer premises equipment, which is multi-tenancy, so one CPE 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.
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 India. So this is a service which, you know, the ambition is 100 million households, and, you know, 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, you know, it works both on Android and iOS operating system. It costs less than $16, and this was launched in May 2023 with good amount of success. Next steps, Reliance Jio is working on a augmented reality device, which will be used across consumer and enterprise segments. And this was demonstrated in the India Mobile Congress, which we...
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. It is also expected that the ARPU will get uplifted based on enhanced video experience. So one is the, 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 AirFiber, which is the fixed wireless access, solution from Reliance Jio. This will be used both in homes and small and medium businesses.
Obviously, it's about deploying a platform solution at scale for enterprises, because enterprises is the next area where enterprises can definitely benefit for seamless 5G connectivity, which is reliable, secure, and provides good quality of service.
So thank you very much, Nitin. It's a 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 the 5G Standalone deployment. So let's go through a couple of questions that has arrived. We start with two questions related to the report as such. As you may have seen, you are now able to 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 the report itself on our website as well, on ericsson.com. And related to that, there's a question about the data points in the report and if there are any spreadsheets of the data available.
And actually, we have a tool 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 JPEGs 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? 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...
For 240 networks, it's a bit more than 40 that has deployed standalone at present time when we are talking. And the prime examples are India, Jio case, which is from start deploying the SA, as Nitin was talking about, but also China, which has decommissioned all the NSA and only 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 a national agenda and a digitalization transformation agenda to supported by 5G, which is why they have chosen to go for 5G SA from the beginning, to really enable all the capabilities with the 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 was, of course, because of the installed base and the architecture at the time when 5G came around in 2019. And also the availability of spectrum and so forth, which played in the favor for NSA. But we are definitely sure that to really utilize the 5G capabilities, you need to have 5G SA, so more and more will go for that. And we see, of course, more operators, both in Southeast Asia and in Europe now, and in the U.S., coming with more and more SA 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? Do you have figures on split between uplink and downlink and respective growth? I think this question was posed 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 the world's network, but in the samples we make, we see 8%-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 then. This will, of course, be interesting to see how it plays out when XR services come, which is more uplink heavy, and how that share might change in the future. Let's see. Yeah, 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 called Others, which is both—well, traffic that is not possible to identify because of encryptions and so forth, and also a tail, a long tail of small applications or small services and emails 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 comprised of 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 editions ago, we did look at the Massive IoT, Narrowband IoT, Cat-M, and what type of traffic and, and, traffic patterns and so forth, for real-time applications or for applications that are, sorry, not real-time application, but real traffic and, and deployments and, and so the difference there. But that's something we might come back to and see. This, of course, is largely different, 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 editions, 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, and how that plays out?
Yep. So I think in the article presented, as we said, most of the data was 4G, but there was a sample in there on a 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 cell edge performance on the downlink was around three times higher. So we could, yeah, visually see there that the improvement that 5G would bring, and obviously we can relate that to that time to content and user experience measure. So 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 FWA solution to 5G. Is 5G FWA solution not being considered alternative to a wireline broadband? Well, I will challenge that statement. We, I mean, if you look at the total connections from 2023 to 2029, we have a three times 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.
Yes, it is being replaced in some markets for ADSL or, or other type of wireline solutions, and of course, where it's cost efficient to deploy compared to fiber and so on. So there are many different types of, deployment scenarios where fixed wireless access is actually, better than a wireline solution than. It's also interesting to reflect on Jio's deployment here, is that they actually use a network slice for their FWA, as Nitin also mentioned, and that is to protect the FWA users, actually, not to protect the eMBB users, because the FWA user is generating four to five times 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, Steve. Regarding on the example of 5G requiring eight to 10 fewer access points, is that the benefit that can only really be seen in gigafactories? Or how small could the indoor place be to see this benefit? Maybe it's a tricky question, but, is there any reflections around that?
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 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 as the example, the automated guided vehicles or these remote cockpits in the green steel plant. Once that becomes a requirement, then the mobile solution is going to be the preferred option to ensure the safety of the operating equipment and those smooth handovers. So I think we, yeah, focus there 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 cut over point would be.
Yeah, that's a very valid comment on the, the benefits of 5G is also not only for the gigafactories, that's, that's for sure. Okay, we are running out of time. There are some questions we will try to answer, afterwards for, and send you an email, but, thanks a lot for joining this session, and thanks for all the good questions. We hope you enjoyed the report, and, welcome you back, in future presentations of the Mobility Report. Have a nice day and evening!