Verizon Wireless today broke all industry records adding an astonishing 1.9 million subscribers in the second quarter. It's only a few million subs away from regaining its largest-operator crown from Cingular, and it's growth shows no sign of letting up. Add to that the fact that Verizon is not mired in the middle of a major business merger or network integration and that it has the only nationwide 3G network in the U.S. You'd think Verizon Wireless was sitting fairly pretty.

Why then are its monthly ARPUs falling? Verizon explained its 2.7% drop by saying that it spent the last six months luring in younger subscribers to its network--heavy discounting that helped contribute to its massive customer gain numbers. Being the fastest growing carrier also means having a disproportionate number of new subs who don't spend as much as more established customers. But VW's ARPUs are among the lowest in the industry, falling just below $50 a month.

If any carrier should have growing ARPUs it should be Verizon Wireless. After investing $1 billion into its 3G networks starting last year, it hasn't shown much in the way of results. Admittedly it takes awhile to coax customers over to those new EV-DO networks, but every quarter Verizon paints a rosy picture of the sheer volumes of data traffic on its network. In Q2 alone, it claimed 36 million downloads of games, ringtones, videos and other content. Even Cingular, which has yet to build a UMTS network, showed almost a $1 increase in ARPU from year-to-year largely driven by higher data revenues.

Perhaps there are some data gains hidden away in Verizon Wireless numbers that we can't see just yet. Voice is rapidly commoditizing and perhaps its commoditizing much faster at Verizon. Part of the problem is of almost all of the carriers, VW offers the least insight into how its data operations work. It doesn't release separate data revenue numbers, nor does it give data subscriber numbers or even users of its 3G network. VW is free to tout its prominence in wireless data all it wants, but until it can give us some numbers or even show a marginal boost in revenues per subscriber, it's difficult to take those claims seriously.

Contact me at kfitchard@primediabusiness.com.