New Millennium Research says new prepaid wireless phone customers outnumbered new postpaid customers for the first time (pdf).
According to the most recent available quarterly data:
- New prepaid cell phone subscribers accounted for nearly two thirds (65 percent) of the 4.2 million net subscribers added by U.S. phone carriers in the fourth quarter of 2009.
- The prepaid segment of the wireless market grew by 17 percent in the 4th quarter of 2009 to 54.4 million subscribers, up from 46.3 million in the same quarter in 2008. By contrast, contract-based cell phone service grew only 3 percent over the same period of time.
- One out of five cell phone subscribers are now using prepaid phones. The prepaid segment represents a larger proportion of subscribers in the US than ever before, hitting 20 percent in the 4th quarter of 2009, up from 18 percent at the end of 2008.
- Overall, there were 285 million wireless subscribers in the U.S. at the end of 2009.
Globally, data traffic (that includes SMS text messaging) topped voice traffic on a monthly basis last year and the total traffic across the world exceeded an exabyte for the first time in 2009. The CTIA has more wireless figures for the United States and an annual survey (pdf).
According to Comscore, iPhone’s share of the smartphone market has remained relatively flat, at 25.4 percent, while Android’s U.S. smartphone market share has grown to 9 percent according to comScore, in the three months ending in February, while RIM, the leading mobile smartphone platform in the U.S. had a 42.1 percent share.
