Some good figures about the US wireless data market, released by telco analyst Chetan Sharma: worth over $7 billion in the first half of 2006 (with $6.3 billion of that garnered by Cingular, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile). He expects wireless data service revenues to exceed $15 billion for 2006, a 75% increase from the 2005 figure of $8.6 billion…the market grew 87% between 2004 and 2005, so the growth has slowed, but not by that much.
Most of the data revenue is still SMS and data transport but the percentage is declining.
There’s a lot of good info here so it’s well worth checking out. Almost all of it is relevant to MocoNews readers, but in the interest of brevity and not cutting-and-pasting the entire page I’ll list some main points here:
–Verizon increased wireless data revenues by 114% year-on-year, Sprint by 71%, T-Mobile by 65% and Cingular by 54%.
–Verizon became the first US carrier to net over $1 billion in wireless data revenues in a quarter. Cingular netted $979 million and Sprint $935 million, so both are likely to cross the $1 billion mark next quarter.
–Sprint had the highest wireless data ARPU at $7.25, but Verizon had the highest percentange of revenue in data at almost 13%. Average data ARPU is now $6.3 or 12%.
–“The top 10 carriers in terms of total wireless data revenues for 1H06 in order of rank are NTT DoCoMo, China Mobile, KDDI, Verizon Wireless, Cingular Wireless, Sprint Nextel, O2 UK, Vodafone Japan, SK Telecom, and China Unicom. (6 Asian, 3 US, 1 Europe. Who says US is behind?)”. Of course, the Chinese carriers are mostly due to their huge subscriber bases…
–Finally, Sharma predicted that Verizon is likely to overtake Cingular as the number one US carrier in the third quarter of 2007…
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