70% of Verizon subscribers are sporting a smartphone

Verizon Wireless announced on Monday that the carrier added 1.7 million new subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2013. For the entire year, the nation's largest carrier added 4.1 million new members. Big Red now has a total of 102.8 million subscribers, only 5 million of which are pre-paid customers. These figures were released on Tuesday, as part of Verizon's fourth quarter earnings report. The company says it now has 35.1 million postpaid accounts, each with an average  of 2.8 subscribers.

While the entire company reported $6.9 billion in net profits for the period, we have some more numbers related specifically to Verizon Wireless. The Average Revenue Per User rose 7.1% year-over-year and is now at $157.21. Wireless revenue increased 5.7% to $21.1 billion and fourth quarter cash flow from the wireless business amounted to $8.3 billion, a gain of 22.4% year-over-year. Verizon's LTE signal now covers 305 million Americans and Big Red's 4G LTE coverage now extends to 99% of the carrier's 3G footprint.

46% of Verizon's postpaid accounts are now on a Share Everything plan and 23% of the upgrades completed during the three months were customers moving from a featurephone to a smartphone for the first time. Smartphones continue to lead the way with 70% of Verizon's postpaid subscribers using one. 58% of the smartphones are 4G LTE enabled. With 25.5 million basic phones and 24.7 million 3G smartphones still on the network, Verizon still has a large number of subscribers it can convert to its top of the line LTE supported phones. Fourth quarter churn was .96%, down 1 basis point sequentially but up 1 basis point year-over-year.

The fourth quarter of 2013 saw Verizon activate a company record 790,000 tablets. For the full year, that number came out to 1.9 million slates. The carrier now has 3.6 million tablets on its network.

Overall, 44% of Verizon's postpaid accounts are using 4G LTE, up from 23% last year. That 44% accounts for 69% of the data traffic on Big Red's pipeline.

source: Verizon