A Wireless Future
Cell phones may overtake computers in Internet data use

Consider these interesting facts: About one percent of American towns with a population of less than 10,000 have cable modem access to the Internet as an option - and fewer than one percent have some form of Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) service available to them.

Cable modem and DSL services are, of course, the higher-speed alternatives to conventional modem access over regular phone lines. In contrast, 86 percent of American cities with a population more than 100,000 have DSL service and 72 percent with a population more than 250,000 have cable modem service. These two forms of high-speed access to the Internet, if not the final destination, are generally acknowledged to be the stepping stones to the widespread broadband network that will revolutionize the way we conduct business and entertain ourselves.

Citizens in Lexington and Louisville, as well as in many moderately-sized Kentucky towns, have both high-speed services available. But anyone who was raised in Kentucky knows that the vast majority of municipalities and communities in the state are small towns.

Furthermore, there are a significant number of our citizens who reside in the countryside and who technically don’t live within any city limits at all. Many of these folks are served by the 18 phone companies that are not GTE or BellSouth – and the big two are limited in the services they are able to offer in rural areas. Local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are hamstrung in their efforts to provide faster service by this lack of high-speed connectivity and people who live in rural areas who contract with national ISPs such as America Online often have to pay toll charges to dial access numbers.

Truth to tell, there remains little reason for national service providers to establish points of presence in rural areas, or for the smaller phone companies to upgrade their equipment solely to provide high-speed Internet access. Predominantly rural areas are simply not profitable to wire because of their low population densities. But there is another technology waiting in the wings to take over.

Wireless services are rushing in to fill the gap, achieving greater bandwidth while skipping two or three generations of conventional telephone technology. In what has become a recurring refrain for me, let me state once more for the record: The future of networking is wireless.

Take the case of Japan. Figures released in May by Japan’s three cell phone service providers indicate that the number of Japanese cell phone users who access the Internet via their cell phones has topped the 10 million mark. That makes the cell phone the most-used device for accessing the Internet in Japan. NTT DoMoCo, the largest of the three service providers, has almost seven million of those customers and is adding more at the rate of 20,000 per day. Of course, Japan is geographically tiny compared to the U.S. and has a much more unified telecommunications infrastructure, which removes some barriers that we face in this country.

Similar to Japan, the Scandinavian countries have an extremely high percentage of citizens with cell phones. According to a New York Times article published last month, more than 80 percent of Finns, Danes, Swedes and Norwegians over the age of 10 have cell phones. They use their cell phones to not only converse, but send e-mail, download news and music and play games.

Unbelievable as it may seem, one recent study of U.S. cell phone users predicts that the three percent of users who now use their wireless phones for data applications (e-mail, corporate server connectivity, web browsing) will rise to a whopping 78 percent in the next year. There is a prerequisite implicit in this optimistic scenario. Corporate America must take the lead in recognizing the benefit of integrating PC and wireless applications and put those kinds of structures in place. As with the PC in the 80s, the technology will then spread from the workplace to the home.

John F. Clark is an assistant professor of telecommunications in the University of Kentucky School of Jornalism and Telecommunications
johnclark@lanereport.com

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