CTIA holds an industry survey a couple times a year to gauge the health of the mobile industry and they just released the results of their latest survey. According to the survey wireless data service revenue hit more than $19.4 billion for the first half of 2009, a 31% increase over this time last year. That is probably due to increased sales of smartphones.

What is truly astonishing though is that 740 billion text messages were sent the first half of this year. That is 4.1 billion per day and twice as many as the 385 billion sent in the first half of 2008.

That’s real good news for wireless service providers. Text messages cost around 10-20 cents for people without plans and text messaging plans cost from $5-$20 per month. The thing is, text messages cost the carriers almost nothing to send. The amount of data being transferred during a 1 minute call could be the same as hundreds of text messages.

With everyone getting phones with dedicated qwerty keyboards and touchscreens, text message usage will only go up. That means much more profit for wireless carriers.

[via MobileCrunch]