CTIA (News - Alert): The Wireless Association says the U.S. wireless industry gained more than 22 million net new customers in 2007, to reach a total of 255 million wireless users. That’s a slower rate of net adds than in the peak year of 2005, when 25.7 million net new users were added.

 

In all, about 84 percent of people in the United States now use mobile phones. In addition to reaching a six-month revenue total of $71 billion, wireless data service revenues for the full year 2007 rose to more than $23 billion.

 

That’s a 53 percent increase over 2006, when data revenue was $15.2 billion. Wireless data revenues for the year 2007 amounted to about 17 percent of all wireless service revenues, an important metric for wireless service providers gradually replacing reliance on voice revenues.

 

And though U.S. wireless consumers were relatively slow to adopt the text messaging habit, more than 48 billion messages reported for the month of December 2007 alone, about 1.6 billion messages per day.

 

That is an increase of 157 percent over December 2006. Wireless subscribers are also sending more and more pictures and other multi-media messages, with nearly 4 billion MMS messages sent during the second half of 2007 alone, compared with 2.7 billion sent over the course of the entire year in 2006.