CTIA IT & Entertainment officially kicks off today with a packed morning keynote, featuring a roundtable discussion by carrier CEOs, including T-Mobile USA’s Robert Dotson, Sprint (NYSE: S) Nextel’s Dan Hesse and Verizon Wireless’s (NYSE: VZ) Lowell McAdam. Also speaking today is Yahoo’s (NSDQ: YHOO) Marco Boerries, and Clearwire’s (NSDQ: CLWR) Chairman Craig McCaw, and John Stanton of Trilogy Partners.

Steve Largent, CTIA’s Chairman opens the show, welcoming everyone, and saying that the wireless industry is weathering the economic storms. It provided some results from a new survey. In the first six months of 2008, data revenue totaled $14.8 billion, or 20 percent of all revenues. A year ago, it was closer to 10 percent. Text messaging is clearly not just a fad: there’s now 75 billion text messages sent every month, that’s 160 percent increase over last June.