The auctioning off of spectrum for the delivery of fourth-generation (4G) mobile broadband services will play a crucial part in driving the country to a digital economy, says telecom network company Ericsson.
Thailand is Asia-Pacific's third-largest 3G subscriber base this year, behind only Australia and Singapore.
Thailand expects to have 105 million mobile subscribers this year, with 75% of them 3G customers.
In September, the country added 5.14 million subscribers, bringing the total to slightly more than 100 million with a mobile penetration rate of 149%.
"Broadband network infrastructure will play an important part in driving a digital economy, apart from cloud computing and mobility software," said Bunyat Kirdniyom, head for communications and regulatory affairs of Ericsson (Thailand).
Mobile users globally are expected to consume 3.5 gigabytes per month per user by 2020, up from 350 megabytes now.
The national telecom regulator needs to allocate sufficient frequencies to support the delivery of 4G services to ensure service quality and accommodate surging mobile data traffic.
Ericsson conducted a report and found that the speed of Thailand's mobile network in this year's third quarter had dropped by 50% to 200 Mbps, compared with 400 Mbps in the second quarter. This was due mainly to the sharp increase in data traffic.
Mr Bunyat said the trends for youth culture, urbanisation and smartphones would have a big impact on the information and communications technology industry in Thailand and Southeast Asia next year.
Ericsson predict that video streaming will account for 55% of global mobile data traffic and 15% of social networking by 2020.
At least 90% of the world's population aged over six will have a mobile phone by 2020, the report predicts.
Smartphone subscriptions are expected to exceed 6.1 billion by 2020, up from 2.7 billion in 2014. The world will see 800 million new smartphone subscriptions this year.
Smartphones account for just 37% of all mobile phone subscriptions, meaning that many users have yet to make the switch to the more feature-rich, internet-friendly option.
The report also predicts that 5G is expected to be commercially deployed in 2020.
The 5G growth will be driven to a large extent by new use cases, especially in machine-to-machine type communications, Mr Bunyat said.