Yesterday during it's 2nd quarter earnings, Verizon Communications announced 45.3% YoY wireless data growth, while its overall earnings grow 11.8% YoY to reach $12.1 billion. Its services revenue increased 11.6% to $10.5 billion as a result of new subscribers and demand for data services. It added 1.5 million net subscribers (almost all postpaid) during this period. Additionally Verizon Wireless increased its ARPU 0.9% YoY to $51.53. The interesting piece is that the total data ARPU actually grow 31.3% which show not only new customers signing up for data services, existing customers are either subscribing to data or upgrading their current data bundles. Verizon Wireless reported that its retail data customer base reached 49.6 million (~75% of its 68.7 million subscriber base)

A couple of weeks ago AT&T posted similarly strong results, 30% YoY increase in Net Income, Wireless data revenue and services both grew 52% YoY. It's wireless data revenue reach $2.5billion and the smartphone penetration increased from 8% to 18% over the year (iPhone sales is a major contributor to this growth).

According to some estimates ~80% of phones shipped in 2007 are capable of data services. 60% of Verizon phones are 3G devices. Almost all of them are now pre-configured for data access. The phone user can start using it anytime, however it they want better pricing they need to subscribe to a data bundle.
With such high percentage of data capable devices in the market, the opportunity is ripe for application developers to build applications and services that can be delivered directly to the users mobile devices without requiring blessings from the Mobile operators. The Mobile Operators should be happy to collect $$$ from the upgrades and new subscriptions of data services. As long as they continue to not be too greedy, this is a WIN-WIN-WIN situation.