Qualcomm's Paul Jacobs has opened this year's Innovation Qualcomm (IQ) event in London with the news that the company expects the adoption of 3G to continue without letting up.

"The wireless internet is here," said Jacobs, praising handsets like Apple's iPhone 4 for taking the smartphone mainstream.

Building on previous numbers that the company released in July, Qualcomm confirmed that it has over 1 billion 3G subscribers already. If you thought that was a big number, Jacobs also confirmed that the company is adding over 23 million subscribers to 3G on a range of different devices a month, a fifth of its total chip shipments a month.

That number means that the company expects there to be a whopping 2.8 billion subscribers by 2014.

That means that over 70 per cent of devices, says Qualcomm, will be 3G by 2014 in Europe, with 50 per cent of 3G chips going to emerging markets in 2011.

So what are we going to be doing all with these fast connections?

Surf the web of course.

Qualcomm's Jacobs believes that, by 2014, monthly data usage from all those devices will be more than all the data used by all handsets in 2008. 

ARM recently told Pocket-lint that it expected there to be 16 billion chips for all walks of life, not just phones, by 2014.

It has also been revealed that 17 per cent of Vodafone subscribers are on a data plan. Telefonica has 16 per cent.