CTIA: Wireless data revenue keeps spiking

LAS VEGAS--The push toward smartphones, netbooks and other data-intensive devices continues to be a major theme--and revenue source--of the wireless industry, according to Steve Largent, president and CEO of CTIA. Largent talked about the rise in mobile data revenue as part of the CTIA's semi-annual survey of the wireless industry.

According to the survey, wireless data service revenues jumped 25.7 percent in the last half of 2009, compared with the last half of 2008, to more than $22 billion. Mobile data revenues--meaning, non-voice revenue--made up 28 percent of U.S. wireless service revenue, up slightly from 25 percent from the CTIA's last survey. There are now more than 257 million data-capable devices on the market, up from 228 million at the end of 2008. A full 50 million of those devices are smartphones or PDAs, and 12 million are wireless-enabled laptops, notebooks or USB modems.

The survey found that, as of December, there were more than 285 million wireless connections in the country, up by 15 million from the year-ago period. Text messaging among U.S. wireless consumers continues to be extremely popular, with more than 822 billion text messages sent and received in last half of 2009--which translated to around 5 billion messages per day at the end of the year. Picture and multimedia messaging is also taking off, and more than 24.2 billion MMS messages were reported for the last half of 2009, up from 9.3 billion for the last half of 2008.

For more:
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