I’ve still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission.
- 2001: A Space Odyssey

The annual results Verizon Communications, announced this week, show that broadband data traffic is booming, notes Light Reading.

Verizon Wireless’s data revenues were $10.7 billion in 2008, up 44 percent over 2007. During 2008, data accounted for fully 27 percent of total wireless service revenues. Two in every three of Verizon Wireless’s retail customers now have a CDMA 1X EV-DO-enabled device. At the end of 2008, Verizon Wireless had 72.1 million total customers. It does not include the 13 million subscribers recently inherited from Verizon’s acquisition of Alltel, which will make them the top U.S. cellular carrier.

Other cellular results from 2008 include:

• AT&T, currently the largest U.S. carrier, added 2.1 million customers during the fourth quarter and ended the year with 77 million wireless customers. AT&T saw overall post-paid ARPU (average revenue per user) growing 3.9% year-on-year to $59.59, while data ARPU grew an 35.7% year-on-year. It had about a third of new customers prepaying in the fourth quarter.
• Sprint Nextel, the third largest wireless carrier, will release its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2008 on Feb. 27. Sprint Nextel reported nearly 51 million customers at the end of the third quarter 2008.
• T-Mobile USA, the fourth largest wireless operator in the U.S., added 621,000 new customers in the 4th quarter. In all of 2008, the Bellevue, Wash.-based carrier added 4.07 million customers. Most of T-Mobile’s 32.8 million customer base, or 82 percent, are under contract.

AT&T said 1.9 million iPhones were activated in Q4, with 40 percent coming from other operators. Verizon’s BlackBerry Storm doesn’t have its own app store while T-Mobile’s G1, introduced in October, is currently limited to free apps.

Customers looking for higher-end smartphones seem to be gravitating toward the two biggest carriers rather than T-Mobile, which is often seen as a value player in the market.

T-Mobile’s G-1 did not move the meter. T-Mobile didn’t provide sales figures for the phone, but did indicate that around 20 percent of phones sold to new customers and existing, upgrading customers were “smart” phones like the G1 that use their new “3G” (AWS-band) data network.

The graph (above) shows the speed (in days) at which each competing handset achieved one million sales. Smart phones made up 14% of all mobile devices shipped globally in 2008 and should increase to more than 17% of the total in 2009, according to ABI Research.

According to Heavy Reading, 3G operators have doubled their cellular backhaul to 20-25 Mbit/s in the last 18 months. A majority expect they will have at least 40 Mbit/s of backhaul capacity deployed at some high-capacity sites within three years. Sprint use DragonWave backhaul gear for their WiMax deployments.

In his election campaign, U.S. President Barack Obama expressed his general inclination toward the net-neutrality model. At stake in “net neutrality” are the terms of low-cost mobile broadband services that support all kinds of real-time multimedia applications.

Sprint and Intel are gambling that the next big thing is data. Whether WiMax will deliver positive results is still unknown.

Posted by Sam Churchill on Thursday, January 29th, 2009 at 5:43 pm.