After an end of year surge, India finally achieved its one billionth mobile connection in 2015.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India confirmed that the world’s second largest mobile market (after China) added nearly seven million new subs in October. That tipped the total past one billion.

Of course, it doesn’t mean India has one one billion phone users –  many users have more than one connection. Moreover, the country has a huge number of handsets with dual SIMs.

Nevertheless, the figure represents amazing growth. India had 2m subs in 2000, according to research firm Ipsos.  Experts say India is now adding 10 to 15 million mobile subscribers every quarter.

Younger ‘mobile first’ users are set to transform online commerce in the US, says Business Insider.

Its new report says that by 2020, mobile will account for 45 per cent of the US’s $632 billion total e-commerce sales. In 2014, mobile comprised 11.6 per cent of a $303 billion market.

So-called Millennials tend to use smartphones and tablets as their primary computing devices. This challenges retailers to optimise their sites for mobile, and also to explore new ways to reach these consumers.

As a result, they’re examining options like on-site buy buttons, single-click checkout, financing services, and unified offline-to-online commerce experiences.

The report analyses the following issues:

• The rising percentage of mobile commerce in an expanding e-commerce landscape.
• Why users are spending most of their time on mobile devices, but most of their dollars on PC.
• The barriers to mobile buying from a consumer-facing perspective.
• How stakeholders are trying to solve these problems and increase mobile purchasing.
• The role that mobile wallets like Apple Pay and Android Pay could play in increasing mobile purchasing in both the browser and the app.

Global ‘machine to machine’ connections will grow by 23 per cent a year, says Berg Insight.

The analyst says the total number of cellular M2M subscribers reached 265.2 million at the end of 2015, and will hit nine figures by 2022.

M2M is the subsection of the Internet of Things in which devices are connected by cellular networks. As such it’s of immense importance to mobile operators, in the context of flatlining voice, text and data subscriptions.

Berg Insight’s new report estimates that East Asia is currently the largest regional market with 90.4 million M2M subscribers, followed by Western Europe and North America with 59.0 million and 52.5 million respectively.

The analyst confirms that MNOs are already benefitting. It says Verizon and Vodafone reported quarterly M2M/IoT revenues in the range of €150-200 million each in the first half of 2015 and could be on track to reach €1 billion on an annual basis within a few years’ time.

Shipments of smartwatches, smart glasses, fitness and activity trackers, people monitoring and safety devices are set to grow 25 per cent a year.

A new report from Berg Insight says connected wearables shipped 72.5 million in 2015, up from 25.3 million in the previous year. At the current rate of growth they will reach 228.3 million units in 2020.

Of course, there are many different ways to connect a wearable. Berg says Bluetooth will remain the primary option and adds that just 17.8 million of the wearables sold in 2020 will embed cellular connectivity.

In terms of sectors, fitness/activity tracking is still the largest device category and shipments were expected to reach 51.0 million units in 2015.

Smartwatch shipments were on the target to reach 19.5 million units by the end of 2015 – a 353 per cent increase year-on-year. That was mostly due to Apple, and it inspired vendors including Fossil and TAG Heuer to launch smartwatches of their own.