About 22 percent of U.S. consumers go online wirelessly outside the home, compared with 16 percent of U.S. online households a year ago, says Sally Cohen, Forrester Research analyst.
Almost half of consumers Forrester surveys say they would like to do so.
Cohen says the growing interest is due in part to familiarity with home Wi-Fi networks as well as public hot spots. About a quarter of of consumers use Wi-Fi at home, she says.
The issue now is how fast mobile operators, Clearwire and Sprint can move to capture additional demand in the form of handheld and PC card forms of mobile Web access.
Because one thing is certain: history tends to repeat itself in the communications business. And that story is that services and features once considered "luxuries" become necessities, and therefore mass market products or even commodities.
Once upon a time families would gather around a phone at Christmas and make a long distance call across the country or world, at some point being exhorted to "keep it short." Once upon a time homes shared a party line.
The point is that broadband use has expanded pretty much as wired voice did. It was place based. At some point a small number of people started to use mobile voice. Now virtually everybody does.
The same thing is going to happen with broadband. People used to share bandwidth at work. Then they got service at home. The next wave will be mobile broadband used by people, just as mobile voice now is.
U.S. industrialists and entrepreneurs have been turning luxuries into everyday experiences and necessities has been going on since the 1870s, depictions of many as robber barons notwithstanding. As with many other innovations, the key is to systematize and standardize and wring cost out of the production of former luxuries so they can be provided as mass market necessities.
Mobile broadband isn't going to be any different. History does repeat.
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