Hot on the heels of the release of Nokia's Q1 2013 results, Verizon has shared its own numbers for the quarter. The big red carrier reports that it added a total of 720,000 connections during the first few months of 2013. Of that total, 677,000 were postpaid connections. Those new users helped to push Verizon to a total of 98.9 million retail connections at the end of Q1 2013, which includes 93.2 million postpaid connections. With around 34.9 million postpaid accounts, that works out to an average of 2.7 connections per postpaid account.

On the hardware side of things, Verizon reports that it activated a total of 7.2 million smartphones in Q1 2013, around 28 percent of which were for customers that were new to the carrier. Activations of 4G LTE devices hit 5.9 million units for the quarter. Speaking of LTE, Verizon says that its 4G network is now available in 491 markets covering 287 million people, which is more than 95 percent of its 3G coverage. The big red operator also said that 54 percent of all its data traffic goes over its LTE network.

Finally, Verizon reports that its total revenues for the first quarter of 2013 finished at $19.5 billion, a figure that's up 6.8 percent year-over-year. Service revenues for the quarter totaled $16.7 billion, while the average revenue per account (ARPA) grew 6.9 percent from Q1 2012 to a total of $150.27 per month.

Sounds like Verizon had itself a pretty decent quarter, no? The news that's likely most exciting to Big Red's customer base is the fact that its LTE network is now available in nearly 500 markets, a number that Verizon will likely hit in the near future. It wasn't that long ago that Verizon was lighting up its 400th LTE market, and I'm sure that customers toting Verizon 4G-enabled hardware are glad to see that their carrier is still keeping itself busy by rolling out more LTE coverage.

As is usually the case with these reports, Verizon will be holding a conference call to dive deeper into its results. The call will kick off at 8:30 a.m. ET, and as usual, we'll be sitting in on it to see if Verizon CFO Fran Shammo and his friends have any other interested details to share with us. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Verizon mentioned during its call that, of the 7.2 million smartphones that it activated during Q1 2013, 4 million were iPhones. The carrier went on to say that half of those were LTE-enabled, meaning that there were 2 million iPhone 5 models activated and 2 million 3G-only iPhone 4S and iPhone 4 activations.

Via Verizon