U.S. Smartphones @ 80% Sales(Android Tops) & Mo' Data than Voice in 2013

Chetan Sharma at Always One Real-Time Access crunched some amazing United States wireless market numbers and predicted that mobile data revenues in the US market will reach $80 billion.

The U.S. market accounts for 5% of the subscriber base but 17% of the global service revenues and 21% of the global mobile data revenues. It also accounts for 40% for the global smartphone sales. Data now constitutes over 85% of the mobile traffic in the US.

U.S. Operators are averaging 80% of their postpaid sales as smartphones with Android dominating though iPhone leads in mindshare.

Sharma noted that data traffic doubled for the eighth year in a row.  He expects the mobile consumption to double again in 2012 and data revenues to exceed voice revenues in the US market in early 2013.

Approximately 30% of the smartphone users average more than 1GB per month.

As new devices and new network technology roll-out keep pace in 2012, the data traffic will grow at the expected pace.

• Verizon and AT&T dominated the year accounting for 68% of the mobile data services revenue and had 66% of the subscription base.
• Verizon maintained its #1 ranking in 2011 ahead of NTT DoCoMo with a whopping $23.7B mobile data year. AT&T maintained its #3 position with $22B in data revenues. Sprint and T-Mobile maintained their #5 and #9 rank in the top 10 mobile data operators list for 2011.
• One out every ten tablets sold uses a cellular connection.