A new Traffic and Market Report from Ericsson says that 85 percent of the world's population will have internet coverage via 3G by 2017 and there will be close to nine billion mobile subscriptions, compared to six billion by the end of 2011. Report expects mobile data traffic to grow by 15 times between 2011 and 2017. Mobile subscriptions reached 6.2 billion in Q1 2012 and 170 million new mobile subscriptions were added during the quarter.

Ericsson also predicts that by 2017 half of the world's population will be covered by 4G LTE networks. Smartphone subscriptions will number around three billion in 2017 compared to 700 million in 2011.

Mobile broadband subscriptions, meanwhile, are forecast to reach five billion in 2017, compared to one billion by the end of 2011.

The report data also points to variations between countries and regions. In the case of mobile net additions, China added the most subscriptions for a single country in Q1 2012 with 39 million, followed by India with 25 million. The Asia Pacific region added in total 93 million subscriptions, followed by Africa with 30 million.

Full report is available here.