Verizon still has strong customer loyalty. It’s quarterly postpaid churn rate is 0.94% which is the same it was in Q3 2011. It also reported that 10% of its retail postpaid base upgraded in Q4. Most (70%) of Verizon’s postpaid phone sales were smartphones and the carrier sold 7.7 million smartphones total in the quarter. It’s smartphone penetration now sits at 44%. Of these smartphones, Verizon sold 2.3 million LTE devices and the carrier increased its portfolio to include a total of 20 4G LTE devices. Speaking of 4G, the carrier exceeded its LTE rollout goals and increased its 4G footprint to cover over 200 millions POPs in 195 markets.
All these smartphone customers have been beneficial to the carrier which reported a retail postpaid data ARPU of $22.76, up 14.3 % year over year. Retail postpaid service ARPU grew 2.5 percent to $54.80. Quarterly service revenues climbed 6.4% year over year to reach $15.billion. Total quarterly data revenues were $6.3 billion and represented 41.6 percent of all service revenues. For the full year of 2011, total revenues were $70.2 billion, up 10.6 percent from 2010. Service revenues were $59.2 billion in 2011, up 6.3 percent year over year.