CTIA's FCC Reply Filing Summary on Wireless Industry’s Innovation and Investment

Last Thursday (11/5), CTIA filed reply comments  to the FCC on the wireless industry’s innovation and investment.    

As we have seen in the last 18 months, the U.S. wireless ecosystem has experienced tremendous change. The industry has embraced the evolution of networks to 3G and now 4G technologies, the explosion of innovative devices, the emergence of application stores, and new machine-to-machine communications.

Specifically, we’ve seen:

• 3G technology has been deployed to more than 92% of the U.S. population;
• At least 33 companies manufacture wireless devices for the U.S. market, and consumers can choose from nearly 630 wireless devices.
• More than 85% of all devices on carriers’ networks are Web-capable and 20% of new devices are equipped with Wi-Fi capability. According to Nielsen, the percentage of consumers actively using mobile Internet capabilities in the U.S. is higher than any other country.
• Well over 100,000 mobile-specific applications have come to the market from six different stores;
• Reported minutes of use (“MOUs”) amounted to 1.16 trillion for the six months ending in June 2009, which is the highest minutes-of-use per month and the lowest price-per-minute of service of the 26 OECD countries tracked by Merrill Lynch.
• Reported SMS messages for the six-month period totaled more than 740 billion, nearly doubling the 385 billion reported for the same period in 2008;
• For the twelve months ending June 2009, providers reported making capital investments totaling $19.5 billion;
• Providers added over 25,000 new cell sites, up 11.5% over the prior year.

CTIA’s most recent data confirms that, despite these challenging economic times, wireless carriers continue to invest and innovate in their networks while consumers adopt and demand the latest wireless services, devices, and applications. This aggressive consumer adoption only serves to fuel the continued virtuous cycle of the wireless ecosystem.