India, June 19 -- Opening thought. This week, the latest Ericsson Mobility Report arrived. The headline estimates are that India's 5G subscriptions are expected to breach the 1.1 billion mark by the year 2031, which is going to be 81% or thereabouts of the total connection penetration at that time. Contrast this with 430 million 5G subscriptions at the end of 2025, which makes up 35% of the total mobile subscriptions. A lot of this will be 4G users upgrading to better and faster plans-with those chunk of subscriptions, totalling 570 million at the end of 2025, to dip to about 160 million by 2031.

"India's rapidly growing 5G adoption based on enhanced mobile broadband and 5G FWA is transforming consumer experiences," notes Nitin Bansal, M...