Ericsson’s June 2026 Mobility Report Highlights + AI impact on network traffic
Ericsson’s June 2026 Mobility report states that:
- 5G global subscriptions have now passed the 3 billion mark with the addition of 162 million in the first quarter of 2026.
- Half of the world’s mobile data traffic is now carried over 5G vs 48% at the end of 2025. It’s forecast to rise to 85% by the end of 2031.
- Mobile network data traffic growth exceeded expectations, at 22% between Q1 2025 and Q1 2026.
- Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) adoption is also growing, with around 70% of FWA service providers now offering the service over 5G.
- The number of commercial 5G SA network slicing offerings has increased from 65 to 84 in just 6 months.
- Cellular IoT connections are expected to approach 8 billion by the end of 2031
“With the upcoming transition to physical AI, traffic patterns will fundamentally shift as we move from centralized models in data centers to distributed, autonomous AI agents embedded across our device vehicles and cities, commonly connected by 5G,” said Ericsson CTO Erik Ekudden, in a statement accompanying the report.
“Mobile networks are no longer only about providing best-effort connectivity, they are becoming critical, intelligent infrastructure that meets diverse application needs, Reflecting part of this shift is the continued rise in new commercial service offerings based on 5G standalone network slicing and the number of communications service providers deploying 5G SA,” Ekudden said.
Image Credit: Ericsson
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Impact of Agentic AI workloads on network traffic:
The most critical engineering takeaway from the report is a profound asymmetry in data traffic growth, heavily driven by agentic AI workloads and user-generated content.
Key Insights:
- AI-driven applications – spanning smartphones, AI/AR smart glasses and autonomous vehicles – are inherently uplink heavy, generating continuous data streams that challenge traditional downlink-dominated traffic patterns.
- Uplink traffic growth is already outpacing downlink for many service providers, with field measurements indicating capacity constraints under peak load. Scenario modeling suggests that additional AI traffic will result in uplink traffic being three times higher in 2031 compared to 2025.
- Current networks are not dimensioned for sustained uplink demand, calling for a step change in design – from 5G software and hardware enhancements in the near term to 6G-native uplink innovations over the longer horizon.
- Traffic Inversion: Traditionally, cellular networks are architected and provisioned to handle heavily downlink-centric (DL) traffic patterns. However, the proliferation of multimodal generative AI and uplink-heavy applications is radically flipping this paradigm.
- Field Measurement Data: Out of 55 global operators analyzed, 43 experienced uplink (UL) growth rates outpaces DL growth. Crucially, 17 of those service providers reported UL expansion exceeding DL by a factor of 1.5x or higher.
- Projections: Ericsson’s scenario modeling suggests that cumulative AI-driven traffic could cause UL demands to spike threefold by 2031 compared to 2025 baselines.
- Near-Term: Immediate deployment of 5G RAN software optimizations and hardware refreshes. This includes pushing for 5G Standalone (SA) core migrations, leveraging AI-optimized Massive MIMO beamforming, and utilizing network slicing to guarantee bounded latency for critical UL channels.
- Long-Term: Transitioning to 6G-native uplink innovations. Early 6G standardization, targeted for finalization around 2028–2029, will focus deeply on AI-native architectures, Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC), and asymmetric air-interface designs natively optimized for continuous data streams.
Market Outlook:
Resolving these capacity constraints requires immediate, targeted infrastructure capital expenditure. While macro RAN spending has faced recent headwinds, the urgent necessity to re-dimension the air interface for an AI-centric world represents a powerful pipeline catalyst for Ericsson and its infrastructure rivals. Telco spending on RAN products has slumped from $45 billion in 2022 to $35 billion last year, according to analysts at Omdia, while Ericsson’s annual sales have dropped from SEK271.5 billion ($28.8 billion) to SEK236.7 billion ($25.1 billion) over this same period.
References:
https://www.ericsson.com/en/reports-and-papers/mobility-report/reports/june-2026
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