Cell Plan Subscribers: 260 Million in the United States

Check out this statistic: The population of the United States is 305 million people and the major wireless carriers: Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile have almost 260 million cell plan subscribers. Can you say “saturation?”

Of the remaining 45 million people; many don’t want a phone or are too young to have a phone. Being there are so few new subscribers to be had, all the major wireless providers are finding the need to grab market share from their competitors. One way they are doing so is by cutting prices on their phones to get customers to commit to their 2-year cell plans. These price reductions are hitting their bottom line.

Wirless providers are dabbling and testing other ways to make money, including: charging cell plan subscribers for premium video content, running text and video ads with content on handsets and charging more for downloaded data.