CTIA Semi-Annual Wireless Industry Survey

CTIA, the wireless industry's lobbying organization, released the results of the association's bi-annual report documenting trends in wireless subscribership, revenue, capital investment and infrastructure.

Among the many results showing the wireless industry's growth, there were dramatic increases in wireless data usage, smart phone adoption, capital expenditures and SMS and MMS traffic. The survey, which tracks data submitted by carriers through June 2010, proves yet again that U.S. consumers are benefiting from the wireless innovation and competition made possible in the current light regulatory environment. The survey found that wireless subscriber connections rose to 292.8 million, an increase of roughly 16 million since June 2009 and represents a penetration rate of 93 percent. These subscribers used 2.26 trillion minutes (up by 19 billion minutes), 1.8 trillion SMS messages (up by 33 percent) and 56.3 billion MMS messages (an increase of 187 percent). Despite these increases in usage, the average local monthly bill fell by 4.2 percent to $47.47 over the same period. Smart phones and wireless-enabled PDAs also grew substantially over the past year, increasing from 40.7 million in July 2009 to 61.2 million in June 2010. This brings the total number of data-capable devices on carriers' networks to 264.5 million. Wireless carriers reported handling 161.5 billion megabytes of data in the six months ending in June 2010, up 49.8 percent from the last half of 2009. SMS-capable devices increased to 243.7 million as of June 2010, which is up from 235.3 million in June 2009. There were more than 243.5 million Internet-capable devices during this survey period, which was an increase of more than 6.4 million since June 2009. While there are challenging economic conditions, the industry continued to invest heavily in wireless infrastructure. Starting in of July 2009, carriers spent $21.6 billion in capital expenditures in the past year for a cumulative total of $295.2 billion since CTIA began tracking the data in 1985.