CTIA’s Annual Survey - Thoughts on ARPU
I was reading Om Malik’s blog yesterday, and came across the results of the annual show survey from CTIA last week. While reading through Om’s “Cliff’s Notes” of the report, one thing that struck me was that Average Revenue per User (ARPU) is just $49.94.
When you consider that your most basic wireless plan runs somewhere between $40 and $50 a month, and the survey shows ARPU as holding almost stagnant over the last five years (as pre-paid and lower-ARPU customers were added, as well as rates dropping with the increased competition), numbers like these make it no wonder some of the biggest news at CTIA this year was around mobile video messaging services and mobile access to things like social networking websites and Napster - new, hopefully “must have” services all in the name of driving up ARPU. Of course, these new services are going to require more equipment – and more network bandwidth, hence more investment – but that is preferable to just digging “deeper” into the pool of lower-ARPU users to raise overall revenues.
