Data revenues at US mobile service providers surged to $23
billion in 2007 and now account for 17% of all mobile service revenues, according to the CTIA. The total represented a 53% increase over 2006.
Much of that revenue is due to the enormous popularity of text
messaging. Nearly 50 billion messages were sent in December 2007 alone.
Multimedia messaging is also growing quickly. During the
second half of 2007, 4 billion multimedia text messages were sent, compared with
2.7 billion in the second half of 2006.
As of December 2007, there were 255 million US mobile subscribers, according to the CTIA. This was a year-over-year increase of more than 22 million.
"Today more than 84% of America has embraced the mobile revolution,
and the new industry survey results clearly show that mobile is the
communications tool of choice for consumers," said Steve Largent, CEO of CTIA.