Average length of U.S. mobile calls drops as text and data use surges

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"Make no mistake: As a nation, we still love talking on our cell phones. After all, a grand total of 2.26 trillion wireless minutes in 12 months —equivalent to an amazing 4-plus million years, if my math is correct — is nothing to sneeze at.

But according to the trade group that represents the nation’s wireless industry, the length of the average U.S. mobile call was just 1.67 minutes in the first half of 2010, only the second time that the average wireless chat fell below two minutes since 1993, when the CTIA began tracking these things.

The first time was in the latter half of 2009, when the average nonroaming wireless call was just 1.81 minutes. Just four years ago, the average length of a wireless chat was nearly three minutes. Interesting. (You can check out a PDF of the results right here.)

Meanwhile, U.S. mobile subscribers are texting more than ever: 1.8 trillion — yes, trillion — text messages in the past 12 months, up a good 33 percent from a year earlier, according to the CTIA.

Let’s put that in perspective, shall we? Say the average text message is about, oh, 80 characters or so (just half the 160-character limit for SMS messages), or about 16 words each (assuming the average word is five letters long). And let’s say the average, full-length book is about 100,000 words in length. Punch those numbers in, and you’ll find that as a whole, the nation’s cell phone users sent the equivalent of 288 million books via SMS in one year — a very rough estimate, no doubt, but still. Compare that with the Library of Congress, whose shelves hold a mere 21 million books.

We’re also sending a lot more picture messages: 56.3 billion between June 2009 and last June — a mere fraction of the 1.8 trillion SMS messages sent during the same period, mind you, but a figure that nearly triples CTIA results for the previous 12-month period.

Mobile data use is up, too, with U.S. wireless users sending and receiving about 161.5 billion megabytes of data in just seven months, up nearly 50 percent compared with the second half of 2009.

On the other hand, the number of mobile minutes we used in the past year — again, 2.26 trillion minutes — rose less than 1 percent compared with the total for the year-ago period (2.24 trillion minutes).

- Sent using Google Toolbar"