Results from the CTIA survey of cellular usage were just released.
The number of US cellular subscribers is up from 194.4M three years ago to 262.8M – a 35% increase. Penetration of the US population is up from 66% to 84% - but still is actually one of the lowest in the world.
Percentage of wireless only households is up from 7.7% to 15.8% - a 105% increase.
Interestingly enough however, the number of E911 calls placed from cell phones was only up slightly from three years ago - 296K in June 2008 up from 260K in June 2005 – only a 13.8% increase. There were only 12.2M send in June 2000.
Meanwhile....
75 billion SMS messages were sent in June 2008 alone. That’s 2.5 billion text message a day / 262.7M subscribers as of June 2008 = average of 9.5 messages per day per cell phone. This is up from 7.2 billion SMS messages per month three years ago. New annualized Yearly rate is thus 600.5 billion per year.
You can see all the stats here:
And interesting article published last week asks whether Carriers are prepared to handle the text explosion...
http://mobiledevdesign.com/tutorials/mobile_carriers_handle_text_explosion-1008/
