A rise in broadband connections across Asia Pacific will generate $1.2 trillion of GDP growth and create up to 35 million new jobs by 2020, according to a GSMA report.
However, this opportunity can only be realized if governments act now to fully release existing harmonized mobile spectrum bands and allocate more spectrum for mobile to meet rising consumer demand and support the development of new mobile services in the longer term.
The findings of the report are further supported by the GSMA’s spectrum estimation model, which predicts a global shortfall of mobile spectrum of between 600 to 800MHz.
In particular, the GSMA’s model finds that there is insufficient spectrum available in the Asia-Pacific region to meet predicted future mobile traffic growth and support planned advances in technology.
Faster-than-expected growth in both mobile data subscribers in China, using 3G and 4G networks, is set to result in almost 15,000 petabytes of data per year being carried on China’s mobile networks by 2019. This is approximately 25% of total traffic forecasted for the entire Asia Pacific region and a compound annual growth rate of more than 55% between now and 2019.
Based on a number of third-party estimates, the report also highlighted that a 10 percentage point rise in broadband connections leads to between 0.26% and 0.92% increase in GDP, and that for every extra 1,000 broadband connections, 33 new jobs are created.
The report also show that 3 billion mobile broadband (3G and 4G) connections are predicted in Asia Pacific by 20207, consuming over 50,000 petabytes of data per year.