So I’m reading RCR News, which is a wireless industry trade magazine. Actually, it’s *THE* wireless industry trade magazine. There are others, but RCR is the New York Times of the wireless universe. Anyway, I’m reading RCR and there’s an article in the October 10th edition about how gigantic the wireless industry has become in the United States.

If someone asked you what the biggest industry was in the US, what would you say? Agriculture? The auto industry? Publishing? Information Technology? Choose any of the above and you’re wrong. The wireless industry has now officially surpassed each of those fields. 2.5% of American jobs (about 3.6 million) are in some segment of the wireless industry. Retail sales, customer service, cell site acquisition, network engineering, handset development, logistics, fraud detection, finance, you name it. As of right now, the industry is generating $118 billion is revenue. The US wireless industry contributed $92 billion to our country’s GDP. It’s estimated that within this decade, the wireless industry will add 2-3 million jobs, pump another $450 billion into the GDP, and crank the consumer surplus up another $700 million.

In fact, the US wireless industry is so huge that if everybody who was employed in the industry were sent off to form our own country, it would be the 46th largest country in the world. That would make Cellularia bigger than Germany, the UK, France, Japan, Italy, Ireland, North Korea, South Korea, Finland, Spain, Iraq, Sweden, and Taiwan, just to name a handful.

All this from an industry that was decades behind the rest of the world only a few years back. Did you know the UK has had GSM (and hence digital cell phones) since the mid 80s? Now, 25 years later, we’re cramming CDMA down the rest of the world’s throats and dictating wireless data standards. We rock!