As mobile broadband takes off, Wi-Fi hotspots will become as irrelevant as telephone booths, Ericsson (News - Alert) Chief Marketing Officer Johan Bergendahl says. Executives at iPass would undoubtedly beg to differ, as enterprise Wi-Fi use increased 89 percent, year over year, from the second half of 2006 to the second half of 2007.

 

The replacement of Wi-Fi usage by mobile broadband obviously assumes widespread mobile broadband adoption, widespread use of picocells and femtocells to increase indoor coverage, reasonable pricing plans, roaming agreements and other service delivery conditions that make the service really convenient and predictable.

 

And where consumers might easily adapt to incremental charges above what they normally expect to pay for mobile voice service, pricing will be a stickier issue for PC card service. If one argues that mobile broadband to a phone device can be successful for prices roughly a quarter of what a consumer expects to pay for a consumer fixed line broadband connection, that's one thing.

 

It might be something else entirely to convince most users that a PC card service allowing mobile broadband access for portable computers is a reasonable purchase if it is priced at equivalent or higher prices than a similar at-home broadband service.

 

To be sure, service providers have been quite successful in getting consumers to value personal mobile voice services enough that a personal service costs about as much, or more than, a fixed line equivalent. Providers are having some success convincing users that an incremental charge to add broadband to a smart phone is a reasonable value. So far, only a minority of users have seen the value of a separate mobile broadband connection costing as much as the fixed line equivalent.

 

Still, once those sorts of issues are sorted out; once users begin to value mobile broadband the same way they have learned to value their fixed broadband connections, the upside is enormous. If one assumes that the general pattern for technology is to change what used to be "luxuries" into "mass market" goods, then service providers stand on the threshold of turning a former luxury (mobile broadband) provided to places into a mass market provided to individual users.

 

The potential market is enormous, and would replicate the earlier move of voice from a shared service into a personal service.

 

Wi-Fi use by enterprise users increased 89 percent in the second half of 2007, compared to the second half of 2006, say executives at iPass (News - Alert), which provides authentication and roaming services between Wi-Fi hot spots and networks. The firm’s customers include more than 3,000 enterprises and more than 400 of the Forbes Global 2000 companies, iPass says.

Based on data gathered from over two million sessions during the period, iPass says European growth is rapidly outpacing usage in the United States, with Europe expanding its worldwide share of hotspot use to 40 percent, up from 31 percent, as U.S. share of usage dropped from 59 percent to 51 percent.

 

Also, London increased its lead as the city with most Wi-Fi use, with session usage rising by 156 percent over the same time period last year.

 

Business travel venues continued to dominate the field, and now account for more than three out of every four sessions globally. Airports led usage with 45 percent of sessions overall. Hotels, though, are rapidly gaining popularity with 146 percent growth, and now account for 29 percent of overall global usage, up from 23 percent last year.

 

Emerging venue types such as train stations and ferries also contributed to the growth. Usage at train stations grew 238 percent year over year.

 

Usage in restaurants was up 217 percent year over year, compared to 35 percent growth for cafés and 26 percent growth at bookstores over the same period. Over the same period, restaurants' share expanded from 9 percent to 16 percent, mostly at the expense of cafés, which dropped from 54 percent to 44 percent, iPass says..