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Producer Price Indexes
Bureau of Labor Statistics > Producer Price Indexes > Methods > Industry Factsheets

Producer Price Index for Wireless Telecommunications Carriers—NAICS 517312

UPDATE With the release of January 2018 data, the PPI for NAICS 517210 was re-coded to 517312 to accommodate the introduction of NAICS 2017.

In January 2012, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) introduced a new index for North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) 517210—Wireless telecommunications carriers, as part of the 2007 NAICS revision. Activities that had previously been covered in the Producer Price Index (PPI) for NAICS 517211—Paging and NAICS 517212—Cellular and other wireless carriers are included as separate indexes in the new PPI for the Wireless telecommunications industry.

The data for Wireless telecommunications carriers—NAICS 517312, which dates back to June 1999, is available online through the BLS website and appears in the monthly PPI Detailed Report.

The following services are covered:

Paging: Establishments provide average prices based on national data. To calculate this average, nationwide revenue for a selected service is divided by the number of subscribers for that service.

Cellular and other wireless telecommunications: To calculate the average revenue for cellular and other wireless voice-grade services, companies initially provide a user profile for each sampled market area. This profile is based on all service features provided across all rate plans in a given area. Features normally included in the user profile are averages of local air minutes, roaming minutes, and other recurring services. This profile becomes the fixed output being priced as the average number of minutes for each service, such as roaming, is held constant in subsequent months. Next, using the same features in the user profile, the company calculates average revenue per access line for each feature. Each average revenue amount is then multiplied by the corresponding feature in the user profile to derive average revenue for a wireless bill.

There are significant differences between the wireless telecommunications index of the PPI and the Consumer Price Index (CPI):

  • The indexes published by the CPI are inclusive of retail taxes. The PPI does not include these taxes.
  • The CPI publishes indexes using urban data only, whereas the PPI includes data from rural as well as urban areas.

 

Last Modified Date: January 4, 2019