Mobile Penetration

USA Mobile Penetration: 91%

Posted by Sam Churchill on March 29th, 2010

The Wireless Association’s Semi-annual wireless industry survey, reported that there are now over 285 million mobile subscribers in the United States, about 91 percent of the total population (pdf).

That’s up 15 million over the same time last year. Growth has slowed due to market saturation. Those 285 million callers used 1.12 trillion minutes of talk time in the last half of 2009, up 3.4 percent of the same period in 2008. Subscriber revenue for 2009 reached $152 Billion for the year.

The information was solicited from the service providers including: direct employment, number of cell sites, total service revenues, roaming revenues as a subset of total service revenues, the average local monthly bill, and the average length of call.

The average monthly bill for 2009 was about $48, down slightly from the year before.

Because not all systems respond, CTIA develops an estimate of total wireless connections. The estimate is developed by determining the equivalent-market designation, age of system, market population, and using surrogate penetration and growth rates applicable to similar, known systems to derive probable subscribership.

Smartphones accounted for 48% of AdMob’s worldwide traffic, up from 35% in February 2009, fueled by heavy application usage on iPhone and Android devices. Symbian is still the predominant operating system in terms of smartphone sales worldwide, but for application usage it’s an Apple/Android party.

The 400 million mobile broadband subscriptions are now generating more data traffic than the voice traffic from the total 4.6 billion mobile subscriptions around the world, said Hans Vestberg, Ericsson’s president and CEO, at the CTIA Wireless trade show in Las Vegas last week.

Research2guidance, a market researcher, says the worldwide smartphone application market will grow from $1.94 billion in 2009 to $15.65 billion by 2013. It’s driven by smartphone growth. They estimate smartphone users will increase globally from about 100 million last year to 970 million by the end of 2013.

source : dailywireless.org