How a 3G World Measures Up

This might just be the year networks finally catch up to the action on the trade show floor at Wireless 2004. The first quarter of 2004 saw a huge spike in 3G (UMTS and CDMA 1X EV-DO) deployments across the globe, and for the first time, U.S. carriers have actually established significant nationwide CDMA 1X, Edge and GPRS networks. Handsets and PC cards are shipping, and developers of wireless operating systems are finally establishing traction. So now it might actually be time to start generating revenues in this industry, and there's little place for them to go but up.

Last year, The Yankee Group estimates, carriers generated only 80¢ per subscriber per month in data revenue. Of course, that number accounts for every subscriber, not just data subscribers, reflecting today's low data usage rates. However, the Yankee Group expects data ARPU to leap to almost $6 a head by 2007, when overall data revenues will reach $12.94 billion. Those are no paltry numbers, but they might not be as high as a lot of mobile data boosters hope. While 37.6% of all subscribers will be data users, the Yankee Group projects, data revenue will account for only 12.4% of total revenue.