Today, we released CTIA’s year-end semi-annual survey and CTIA’s Wireless Industry Indices report (the comprehensive round-up and analysis of the survey results).
Once again, the wireless industry survey reveals some extraordinary results. Capital investment, for example, reached an all-time high in 2012. Wireless carriers invested more than $30 billion in capital in the U.S. in 2012, amounting to a quarter of all wireless investment around the world (according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch).
Since 2000, wireless providers invested more than $296 billion, not including the more than $35 billion in spectrum auction revenues paid to the U.S. government.
As a result, commercially operational cell sites deployed by the responding carriers reached a high of 301,779 at year-end, up more than 6 percent year-over-year.
Some of the other results (& see charts below):
- Wireless subscriber units (or connections) – active devices associated with subscriptions or prepaid accounts – totaled 326.4 million at year-end.
- That’s equal to 102 percent of the total U.S. population.
- More than 152 million were smartphones.
- 22.3 million were wireless-enabled tablets, laptops or wireless broadband modems.
- If it’s Wi-Fi only, we don’t count it.
- More than 76 million of them were prepaid or “pay as you go” units.
- Participating wireless carriers reported handling almost 1.5 trillion MB of data in 2012 – up 69.3 percent from 2011.
- If each book in the Library of Congress’s book catalog were digitized at 1 MB each, that would mean wireless carriers were delivering almost six times the Library of Congress’ book collection every hour of every day of the year.
As the wireless industry evolves, CTIA’s semi-annual survey evolves with it. We strive to maintain a consistent base of responding companies, and the core metrics measured by the survey remain the same. But dynamic change is inherent in the industry. As new services arise, and older ones mature, how they are measured often changes. For example, because service providers increasingly do not distinguish between data and non-data services and revenues, wireless data revenues will no longer be tracked or reported via CTIA’s survey. We’ll release our mid-year report in October at MobileCON.
