{"id":389828,"date":"2010-03-04T18:00:06","date_gmt":"2010-03-04T23:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.wordpress.com\/?p=103569"},"modified":"2010-03-04T18:00:06","modified_gmt":"2010-03-04T23:00:06","slug":"u-s-mobile-market-highly-competitive-and-the-iphone-still-rocks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/389828","title":{"rendered":"U.S. Mobile Market: Highly Competitive, and the iPhone Still Rocks"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pretty much everything you’ve read about the U.S. mobile industry is true: The networks suck — some more than others — and the iPhone is still a king-maker. Yet according to data collected<\/a> by Wireless Intelligence, during the quarter ended Dec. 31 2009, 5.9 million net new subscribers signed up for wireless services, the highest number of new adds made during a three-month period in three years.<\/p>\n

The battle for subscribers among carriers is best reflected in the recent moves made by Verizon and AT&T. Verizon, which ended December 2009 with 91.2 million subscribers, has launched a slew of smartphones, including the much-hyped Motorola Droid. The company also launched a nasty ad campaign to highlight AT&T’s network weakness. The net result: it added 2.2 million net new subscribers during the most recent quarter, the most since the third quarter of 2008. As Jon Groves, analyst with Wireless Intelligence, writes in the report:<\/p>\n

\nIn comparison, thanks in part to Apple’s iPhone, AT&T added 2.7 million net new subscribers, taking its total to 85.1 million.Head-to-head after stripping out reseller and wholesale net additions, Verizon reported 1.2 million net additions in 4Q09 against AT&T\u2019s 900,000…However, the iPhone yet again remained a very strong proposition for AT&T, with 3.1 million iPhone account activations reported in the fourth quarter — the second-ever highest quarterly total – of which more than a third were new AT&T subscribers…The remaining operators continue to feel the squeeze outside of the device exclusivity and coverage available from AT&T\/Verizon in the contract market and the \u2018unlimited\u2019 offerings from the likes of Straight Talk in the prepaid segment.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You can drill down into individual wireless carriers numbers by checking out the GigaOM Q4 Wireless Scorecard.<\/a><\/p>\n

The growth during the quarter also masked some dangerous trends, however. As Chetan Sharma, a contributing analyst for GigaOM Pro, recently pointed out, during the last three months of 2009<\/a>, “voice ARPU declined by a substantial 98 cents for U.S. carriers” and “data ARPU increased by a mere 4 percent to 53 cents as overall ARPU decreased 45 cents on the year.”<\/p>\n\n\n
\"USmobilemarket2009-taleofthetape.gif\"<\/table>\n<\/tr>\n<\/td>\n

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):<\/strong><\/p>\n


\nEverybody Hertz: The Looming Spectrum Crisis<\/a><\/p>\n

Thumbnail image courtesy <\/a>of Flickr user Rennett Stowe<\/a><\/p>\n

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Pretty much everything you’ve read about the U.S. mobile industry is true: The networks suck — some more than others — and the iPhone is still a king-maker. Yet according to data collected by Wireless Intelligence, during the quarter ended Dec. 31 2009, 5.9 million net new subscribers signed up for wireless services, the highest […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":674,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-389828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mobile","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/674"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=389828"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389828\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=389828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=389828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=389828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}