LAS VEGAS  – It was clear from the opening of the show that all eyes and ears would be on wireless data. Phil Goldstein of FierceWireless published a piece about the wide range of data-intensive devices that account for a growing source of revenue in the wireless industry. Eric Savitz of Barron’s covered highlights of AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson’s keynote address, which echoed sentiments expressed earlier by his AT&T colleague Ralph de la Vega. Savitz wrote, “Wireless data consumption will continue to surge as the industry adopts 4G technology in the next few years. [Stephenson] noted that wireless data traffic had grown 3,000% in the U.S. over the last three years; for AT&T the growth has been 5,000%.”

Additional highlights from the CTIA semi-annual survey:

• Wireless data service revenues increased 25.7% from the second half of 2008 to reach more than $22 billion in the second half of 2009.
• Overall, wireless data revenues grew to more than 28% of all wireless service revenues.
• There are now more than 257 million data-capable devices in consumers’ hands, up from 228 million at the end of 2008. 50 million of these devices are smartphones or wireless-enabled PDAs, and nearly 12 million are wireless-enabled laptops, notebooks or air cards.
• 822 billion text messages were sent during the second half of 2008, and more than 1.5 trillion messages were sent for the entire year. Meanwhile, 24.2 billion multimedia messages were sent during the second half of 2009, more than double the number sent in all of 2008.
• On the voice side, wireless customers used 1.12 trillion minutes in the second half of 2009, up from 38 billion minutes during the second half of 2008.
• Total wireless service revenues for the second half of 2009 amounted to almost $77 billion.

-Stacey Infantino

Image courtesy of Aaron Landry via the Creative Commons attribution license.

Bookmark to:

Tags: 4g technology, air cards, ctia, ctia wireless, data consumption, data service revenues, data-capable devices, fiercewireless, multimedia messages, phil goldstein, smartphones, wireless data, wireless data traffic, wireless industry, wireless-enabled laptops

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 24th, 2010 at 4:14 am and is filed under 4g, mobile ecosystem, mobile internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.