There have been a lot of nice people calling up and asking for the current size of the US Paging Market. Of course, there are two markets, the "Public" and the "Private" markets. Or the "Subscriber" and the "On-site" (On-premise) markets. As you have probably noticed, I have been trying to get the carriers to voluntarily publish numbers of subscribers for the last couple of years. Arch and Metrocall have been good to give their units in service in Press Releases, 10-Q Reports, Annual Reports, and an Investor Presentation. Some of the other carriers don't publicly report units in service. So I went back through all the materials that I could find and put together a short Paging Market Report that follows below.

If there are mistakes maybe they will evoke comments and corrections. Whether you think it is good or bad is not important; we need to know the facts. Everyone needs to know—analysts, investors, manufacturers, academics, and marketing people. I had to estimate some of the Paging market attrition. If you have access to more accurate figures, please share them with me. It is for the good of our industry. People in the cellphone industry can go to the CTIA web site anytime they want to and find out how many US subscribers there are. Why can't we?

Promoting Wireless Messaging, Telemetry, and Paging.

Your help is needed.

Help keep the newsletter going. Click on the PayPal button.

US Public Subscriber Paging Market Report

Section three contains my new report on the US Subscriber Paging Market. The other sections are background information from previously published reports. In the first two sections, the number of units in service (UIS) and the number of units lost, are given as they were reported by Metrocall and Arch, at the end of the first and second quarters in 2004, in press releases. The third section is my estimate of how many paging units remained in service at mid-year 2004. The fourth section is the Metrocall estimate of the 2003 market size from their December 3, 2003 Investor Presentation¹. The fifth section is the Metrocall estimate for the total US market at its peak in 1999 and was taken from the same Investor Presentation.

Parity with cellphones happened at somewhere around 40 million subscribers. The CTIA web site, at this writing, reports “175,376,566 Current US Wireless Subscribers” (cellphones). So then, cellphones surpassed Pagers at about 40 million. Paging continued to grow for a short time, and peaked at about 45 million in 1999. Cellphone growth then accelerated to its current 175 million subscribers. Public Paging lost about 35 million subscribers from its peak in 1999—to the present—and continues to drop at an alarming rate. I estimate the attrition has been about one million users so far this year (2004).

Caveat:
The figures in this report were reviewed by several senior industry insiders before being published. While some of my estimates in section 3 were confirmed as being very close, the general opinion was that the overall industry numbers are too high (mostly the "All Others" section). This is because they are based on the Arch Inventor Presentation numbers that some believe to be overstated in certain areas (and understated in others). It also uses the Metrocall 2003 share-of-market percentages. The US public Paging industry was more likely between 9 and 10 million subscribers at mid-year 2004 according to others. They may be right.

¹ Metrocall Investor Presentation December 3, 2003
² Arch Wireless Reports First Quarter Operating Results
³ Metrocall Reports First Quarter 2004 Operating Results
⁴ Arch Wireless Reports Second Quarter Operating Results
⁵ Metrocall Reports Second Quarter 2004 Operating Results

Do you have any comments about the state of the Wireless Messaging and Paging industry? Your opinions are important. Here is a place where you can make them known. Special thanks to those who helped out with this Paging Market Report. This is a community effort. (Last update 3/16/05)

With best regards,	Brad Dye WIRELESS DATA CONSULTANT P.O. Box 266 Fairfield, IL 62837 USA		WIRELESS DATA
	Skype:	braddye
	E–mail:	brad@braddye.com
	Web:	Consulting page MAY I HELP YOU?
	"If you think you can do a thing or think you can't do a thing, you're right." —Henry Ford "Do, or do not. There is no try." —Yoda
	Anyone wanting to help support The Wireless Messaging Newsletter can do so by clicking on the PayPal DONATE button to the left.
	This newsletter is brought to you by the generous support of our advertisers and the courtesy of iland Internet Solutions Corporation. For more information about the web-hosting services available from iland Internet Solutions Corporation, please click on their logo to the left.
FLEX, ReFLEX, FLEXsuite, and InFLEXion, are trademarks or registered trademarks of Motorola, Inc. Si desea escribirme en español, puede hacerlo con toda confianza.