The US passed 400 million mobile connections at the end of 2017, up 1.1 percent from 395.5 million at the end of 2016, according to the latest annual report from industry group CTIA. The number of smartphones rose 4.3 percent to 273.2 million, equal to 82 percent of Americans, while data-only devices jumped by 19.5 percent to 126.4 million at the end of 2017.
The CTIA estimates each American has an average 1.2 mobile devices, based on the total of 400.2 million mobile connections. Smartphones alone generated an average 5 GB of data traffic each month in 2017. Total mobile data traffic rose 14.3 percent on an annual basis and was up four-fold since 2014 to reach 15.7 trillion MB last year.
Despite the growing number of devices and traffic, service revenues for the industry fell in 2017, by 5 percent to USD 179.1 billion. Average monthly revenue per connection dropped to USD 38.66 from USD 41.50 in 2016, due in part to the growing number of connected devices using only limited amounts of data.
Capital expenditure by the mobile operators reduced slightly in 2017, to USD 25.6 billion from USD 26.3 billion the previous year. That's equal to just over 14 percent of service revenue. Much that went to improving LTE coverage, which reached 99.7 percent of the population at the end of 2017. The total number of cell sites increased 4.3 percent last year to nearly 323,500.
