CTIA: Growin’ mobile
Americans’ love affair with mobile phones seems to be deepening. Early results from a semiannual wireless industry survey to measure industry growth in the United States show 95 percent of users say they are satisfied with their wireless service. Seventy-five percent say they get excellent or very good value for their money from their wireless carrier.
Steve Largent, president and chief executive officer of CTIA: The Wireless Association, said there are more than 270 million wireless customers in the United States, up more than 15 million in the last year.
(Readers of sports or politics articles may remember Largent as a former Oklahoma congressman or a Hall of Fame wide receiver for the Seattle Seahawks.)
Americans spent more than 2.2 trillion minutes on their mobile devices last year and sent and received more than 1 trillion text messages — triple the number from 2007. More than 620 billion text messages were sent in the last half of the year, pointing to continued surging growth.
CTIA Wireless 2009 opened Wednesday morning at the Las Vegas Convention Center. The convention, which runs through Friday, includes more than 1,000 exhibiting companies, dozens of industries, and more than 40,000 professionals from 125 countries.
I have a demonstration ride this afternoon with officials from Motorola Inc., which will be showing off the latest Long-Term Evolution (LTE) technology. This is a new, standards-based flavor of wireless broadband that will be available in the United States sometime in 2010. I'm told I'll be riding through the streets of Las Vegas in a vehicle outfitted to show high-definition video programming and let riders play online games, all wirelessly and all with zero latency. That means no wires and no lag between what you do with a game controller and what happens on the screen.
Broadband isn't only here. It will soon be everywhere. Folks here are banking on it.
For more from CTIA check out www.ctiawireless.com
