CTIA's aual survey shows US mobile data use up, investment slightly down - CNET

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The largest trade group for wireless industry, the CTIA, on Monday aounced the highlights of its aual US survey for 2015. Some results are unsurprising: data usage has more than doubled and carrier revenue has increased (though not by much). Others are a bit depressing: investment has dropped year over year for two years in a row and the number of cell towers has barely increased.

Aual wireless data usage has jumped 137 percent since 2014 to almost 10 trillion terabytes of data; that's about 804 billion megabytes per month, the equivalent of more than 400 million 2GB HD movie downloads. We're using 17.4 percent more minutes for voice calls and 43.7 percent more for sending MMS messages -- likely cat photos -- while plain old texting has dropped by 1.5 percent.

While carriers have taken on over 81 percent more subscribers, their revenue has only gone up by about 2.2 percent, and capital investment has gone down two years in a row: 3.3 percent between 2013 and 2014 and 0.3 percent between 2014 and 2015. And we've only seen about 9,600 new cell towers across the country over that period. Cold comfort for folks in remote locations.