Ericsson President and CEO Hans Vestberg encouraged the telecom industry to grasp its additional growth opportunities and lead beneficial change in society.

"By leveraging our joint capabilities, we can transform other industries such as health, transport, media, government and utilities. Broadband will not only play a key role in creating new business models that transform economies, but it will also reduce carbon emissions from all the ways we work and live," he said.

In the speech at the recent GSMA Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona, Spain, Vestberg described the levels of transformation reaching across society, business, and especially people, where changing behaviors and the growth of mobile broadband subscriptions lend support for the vision that 50 billion devices will be connected. "People want their devices to be connected and they are willing to pay for it," he said.

Ericsson ConsumerLab has just completed a study in which survey respondents suggested that an acceptable range of spending is between 29 and 46 dollars per month for a combination of extra devices.

Vestberg urged industry partners and colleagues to collaborate on standardization and new thinking to take advantage of growth opportunities. "We're in a unique situation. I'm optimistic about this industry but there are challenges. We need standardization to drive down costs and drive up traffic, and we need diverse payment plans," he said.

Mobile broadband has moved from being nice to have in our world, to being a necessity. "We used to decide when to go online, but now we decide when we should go offline," Vestberg pointed out. "That desire, to be always connected, plus lower prices of smartphones, affordable laptops and netbooks gives our industry a huge opportunity for growth."

The CEO stressed that the change in telecoms affects more than the wealthy world. "Our world faces two major challenges today: poverty and climate. Our industry can play a vastly important role in these issues," Vestberg said.

Meanwhile, Ericsson has launched its own online applications store called eStore which is a market place where operators easily can set-up and offer mobile phone users an applications from a variety of over 30,000 applications that can downloaded to any mobile phone. Some of the applications are free to download while others can be paid via a prepaid or via the phone bill. Content is available for thousands of handset models and applications are continuously verified for many of the most popular feature and smartphones on the market today.

Jan Wäreby, Ericsson Senior Vice President and Head of Business Unit Multimedia, said eStore makes it possible for the user to access a wide collection of applications from any mobile phone of choice and at the same time it also provides an opportunity for operators to increase their revenue.