Internet giant also predicts number of end users accessing Web via PCs to grow to 5 billion over next eight years.
Google’s U.K. director Peter Fitzgerald on Tuesday predicted that global mobile subscriptions will grow to 10 billion by 2020 from 5 billion today.
Addressing attendees at Total Telecom Wireless World in London, he also forecast that the number of end users accessing the Internet via PCs will reach 5 billion compared to 2 billion in 2012.
“Most of the world has not seen of or even heard of the Internet, we’re still really in the early stages,” he noted.
Of course, infrastructure is required in order for people to get online in the first place, and the telecoms operators in the audience were keen to ascertain what a company like Google, which takes full advantage of network capacity with services like YouTube, is doing to stimulate the deployment of said infrastructure.
Fitzgerald referred to Google’s U.S. fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) projects in Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri, as an example of how the company is participating in the development of next-generation networks. Construction of the Internet giant’s high-speed fibre network – which aims to deliver synchronous 1 Gbps connection speeds – began in September 2011.
“We’re hoping to prove that it’s economically viable to deploy high-speed connectivity,” he said.
“The ultimate goal is to have Internet connectivity wherever you are in the world,” he continued. “What we’re trying to do is spur this connectivity.”
Fitzgerald also presented some of the benefits of this connectivity to U.K. businesses.
“Businesses in the U.K. that engage with the Web are growing seven times faster than those that aren’t… they are doing twice as much business internationally than those who aren’t,” he said.