50% Mobile Broadband Penetration by 2013?

The actual extent of mobile broadband usage in five years time is quite a jump ball. The conventional wisdom--undoubtedly correct--is that mobile broadband is growing, even if we might be a bit ahead of the game to call it "mainstream" at the moment.

If one assumes a smartphone sale is farily linearly a predictor of the sale of a data plan, increasingly of the broadband sort, then at the moment sales volume in the U.S. market is something on the order of 20 million units a year, but scaling smartly.

Of course, though we normally assume the sale of a smartphone comes with an activated data plan, that might not always be the case, as some of the market is of the "replacement" sort. Also, smartphones are not the only driver of mobile broadband. Of late, PC cards have been substantial contributors.

So the big change in market receptivity is the expansion of mobile broadband from the "mobile email" and "mobile PC" to "mobile Web" user cases.

In 2008, there might have been 38 million mobile email users in the United States, a reasonable proxy for the smartphone part of the mobile broadband ("data plans") market. That, at least, is the market size researchers at Mpathix suggest was the case.

Nielsen Mobile estimated in August 2008 that there were 13 million mobile data cards in use in the United States, to give you some idea of the installed base.

At the end of 2006, out of the 225 million cellular subscribers in the United States, 15 million used a 3G-based mobile broadband service via cell phone, PDA More about PDAs, laptop or other device, researchers at Parks Associates estimated. Parks Associates also estimated there were 3.5 to 4 million data card service subscribers in the United States in mid-2007.

That clearly is changing now with the advent of mobile Web devices such as the Apple iPhone, to be sure. Still, 38 million is a significant increase from the 12.1 million mobile email users in 2005, MPathix says. It is an even bigger increase from the six million mobile email users Research in Motion estimated were part of the U.S. user base at the beginning of 2006.

Parks Associates now estimates that nearly 60 million smartphone units will be sold in 2013. Parks Associates also estimates that in 2013, U.S. consumers will purchase over five million connected cameras, over one million 3G-enabled MIDs (portable media players), and over two million 3G-enabled netbooks (mini-PCs). There arguably is a less-linear relationship between purchases of those sorts of devices and activation of mobile broadband service, though.

So Parks Associates estimate that, by 2013, there will be over 140 million U.S. consumers paying for mobile broadband, including services provided to every device capable of such communication, argues Kurt Scherf, Parks Associates VP. As there are now 263 million mobile accounts in service, the 140 million represents more than half of the total number of wireless accounts. True, wireless subscriptions continue to grow, though at a slowing rate as we near 90 percent pentration. Still, that is a rather breathtaking scenario.

Keep in mind that U.S. fixed broadband penetration is somewhere north of 55 percent, in a market where 20 to 25 percent of homes do not own PCs, and in a market where perhaps 10 percent of Internet users remain on dial-up services, and perhaps 60 percent of those users say they do not want to upgrade to broadband.

The 50-percent mobile broadband penetration would represent a more-extensive degree of penetration by far, as it represents penetration of people, not of dwellings.