Hot on the heels of AT&T’s quarterly earnings report, Verizon announced its earnings for the opening quarter of 2011 this morning. Overall, the wireless division had a strong quarter and added 1.8 million new connections. About 906,000 of these new subscribers were retail postpaid customers, while the remaining 897,000 were wholesale and other connections.
Verizon now boasts of 104.0 million total connections, an increase of 6.1% year over year. This includes 88.4 million retail customers. Data revenue also continued to grow for Verizon Wireless in Q1. Data revenues climbed 22.% to top out at $5.5 billion. Data now accounts for 38.1% of all service revenue. Total service revenue was up 6.3% year over year and now totals $14.3 billion.
Smartphones were a strong seller for Verizon – almost 60% of phones sold this quarter were smartphones. The carrier confirmed it sold 2.2 million iPhones in the six weeks the phone was available and 260,000 HTC Thunderbolt handsets in the two weeks it was available. Overall, the carrier sold 500,000 4G LTE devices which include handsets and LTE modems.
For more details, please read Verizon’s earnings report on the next page or point your browser to Verizon’s investors website for the earnings conference call.