Sales of mobile broadband services are set to quadruple in the next five years from $24 billion to $137 billion in 2014, according to analyst firm Ovum.
The company has said that more than two billion people will use mobile broadband by 2014, but that the average revenue per user will drop.
By 2014 over 258 million people globally will access mobile broadband through laptops, data cards and USB modems. Ovum claims that emerging markets will fuel much of the growth, and that 40% of all mobile broadband laptop users will come from the Asia-Pacific region.
“The advent of 3G in markets such as China and India, the sheer number of mobile users, and poor fixed-line penetration in these markets, means that broadband access to a very large number of people will be purely mobile,” a company statement said.
But as demand for faster networks and data flows, Ovum says network quality will become a more important factor when consumers decide which services to purchase.
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
