The tech story of the day is unquestionably this InfoWorld story that quotes Ericsson’s Chief Marketing Officer Johan Bergendahl saying that WiFi hot spots are yesterday’s news and are about to be surpassed by mobile broadband.
As most of the tech press and blogs have been quick to point out, however, Ericsson just happens to be trying to promote their own particular flavor of mobile broadband as the new standard for cell phones and other wireless devices. So, you might need to consider anything their Chief Marketing Officer says as being a little bit biased.
At CNet News.com, Marguerite Reardon has a bit of a rebuttal for some of Bergendahl’s claims. Her argument is not that Bergendahl is wrong, he’s just a bit ahead of himself. As I myself have learned recently, carrying around my iPod Touch, WiFi hot spots are not always where you want them to be, and offer essentially no quality-of-service guarantee. Municipal WiFi initiatives have been slow to take off or have been left half-finished, so there’s no public WiFi infrastructure to speak of. But, the overall footprint of WiFi is improving, and the cost for using it keeps coming down (as the recent Starbucks announcement demonstrates), and the install base of laptops and handheld devices with WiFi is already very large and likely to keep growing, especially since the “3G” mobile broadband folks are still arguing over standards and charging exorbitant rates for usage. In fact, the network effect (no pun intended) of WiFi is already so well along that it might hamstring any effort to supplant it with mobile broadband unless mobile broaband can offer a very strong case for getting people to switch.
Bergendahl is not the only person to make this claim, though. A few weeks ago I read this opinion piece at the British tech website IT Pro saying basically the same thing. It’s worth observing, I think, that because the cellular service business is so much more competitive and robust in Europe and the U.K. than it is in the U.S., it IS probably more likely that mobile broadband will expand its reach faster there and have a better chance of supplanting WiFi than it will here.
