With mobile services still on a rapid upswing in markets such as India and China, the past week saw the global mobile subscriber base reaching a new high of 5 billion on Thursday July 08, 2010, estimates leading telecom vendor, Ericsson.

The per day mobile subscription additions come out to be 2 million and the mobile subscriber base for 3G services alone stand at over 500 million. The growth in subscriber base over the last few years is magnified when compared to the 720 million subscriptions across the globe observed in the year 2000. China alone today has more mobile services subscriptions which surpass this number.

And while the world’s population stands at just over 6 billion, the growth of mobile services is expected to scale even further with Ericsson predicting that there will be over 50 billion connected devices by 2020.

Even new services such as mobile broadband are growing at a rapid pace and are expected to peak to 3.4 billion by the year 2015 from the 360 million subscribers for the services in 2009. Ericsson further says that study findings indicate that in the near future, 80% of all people accessing the internet will be doing so using mobile devices.

The dependency on mobile services is not restricted to convenience for communicating. In fact, it has become a necessity for most as it provides a medium for unbanked to avail of banking services. It provides applications and services of interest to fishermen and farmers. Through mobile services, local medical care can be provided to villagers and also online education can be provided to children. Small businesses also stand to benefit out of the services and this leads to overall growth in economy.

Data services are expected to be the main choice of consumers as Ericsson’s observations highlight that in December last year, the amount of data traffic carried over mobile networks exceeded the amount of traffic generated from voice calls.

In the days to come, mobile services are also expected to be converged with machine-to-machine communications (M2M) and this is estimated to be a key component in the future growth of mobile services. Ericsson says probable use of mobile services in such a converged ecosystem can be as smart meters that read themselves for energy companies helping them to increase business efficiency and also to reduce operational expenses.

Similarly mobile services can also be used in transportation industry as a tracking solution for fleet movement which can ultimately help in improving route optimization and also the safety of vehicles.

Other M2M applications pinpointed by Ericsson include Digital signs that can be updated remotely, cameras that can send pictures halfway around the world and even a soda machine that requests restocking when needed are other examples that machine-to-machine technology make possible.