Amp’d Mobile today offered its first insight into its market performance, announcing its customer base is rapidly approaching the 50,000 subscriber mark after nine months of operation. The next three months will be the critical growth period, though, as the virtual carrier is targeting 150,000 subs by the end of the year, Amp’d officials said.

The MVNO opened for business last December, offering its data-centric all-3G service over its Web portal for the first time. Its marketing and advertising efforts, however, didn’t kick off until early this year, and only over the summer did it begin distribution over other channels outside of its Web portal, landing a deal with Best Buy to sell its service off the retailer’s sales racks. The deal paid dividends, as Amp’d reported signing up 15,000 subscribers in the last month, shortly after the Best Buy agreement took effect. Amp’d is now projecting 20,000 to 25,000 net adds for the coming month and more than 75,000 adds for the final two months of the year—the peak holiday season.

Though Amp’d Mobile’s overall subscriber base may not be impressive compared to the millions that the national carriers add every quarter, the revenue it garners off those individual users is. Amp’d said its ARPU is more than $100 a month, twice the national average. In addition, the company said it is taking in approximately $30 a month per subscriber for data services, six times higher than the data ARPUs reported by the major wireless carriers. Amp’d runs its service over the EV-DO network of Verizon Wireless, making each of its handsets automatically 3G capable. That fact and the multimedia- and content-centric service it offers help to greatly boost those data revenues. Amp’d said its customers are streaming or downloading roughly 200,000 videos each month—about four videos per customer—and it expects to have delivered more than 1 million video streams by the end of the year.

Amp’d Mobile’s Q3 success may work to offset some of the poor performance of resale carriers and MVNOs of late. In the second quarter, all of the major network operators reported significant losses of wholesale subscribers, which is where MVNOs users are tracked. Verizon Wireless, which operates Amp’d network, lost 100,000 wholesale subscribers between April and June of this year.

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