Wireless industry association CTIA's President and CEO Steve Largent kicked off the organization's bi-annual event this morning in San Diego with a number of key metrics that quantify the industry's growth in the past year:
The total number of wireless subscribers in the U.S. is now more than 276 million, Largent said. In the first half of 2009, some 740.3 billion text messages were transmitted over U.S. carrier networks. Largent said that makes for 4.5 billion text messages transmitted everyday. The number of picture messages, also called MMS, increased to 10 billion sent during the first half of 2009. Largent said that the figure represents an 83 percent increase over the same period last year.
In April, at the last CTIA event, Largent released these metrics:
Subscribers: The total number of subscribers at the end of 2008 was more than 270 million, which is 15 million more than year-end 2007. Text Messages: Some 1 trillion text messages were sent and received during 2008, triple the number of texts in 2007. Interestingly, 620 billion texts were sent during the second half of 2008.
