The penetration of the mobile Internet will likely overtake fixed usage within the next decade, a senior Yahoo! executive told the Show Daily.
The driving force behind this growth, claims Steve Boom, Yahoo!’s VP of Broadband Access & Bundled Services, will be the pace of innovation that is already underway within the mobile arena.
Key to this rapid uptake will be the adoption by consumers of mobile services that have proven to be successful within the fixed environment but can easily transfer to the mobile world. Boom points to the success in the enterprise space of mobile email applications such as seen with the Blackberry. “It will only take one or two services that the consumer finds essential to trigger explosive growth in the mobile Internet. The impact of the Blackberry in the corporate world is an indication of what can happen – the growth of this company has been a classic ‘hockey stick’.”
Boom claims that the mobile Internet today could be likened to the maturity of the fixed Internet around a decade ago. “What this means is that the basic access experience reminds the mobile consumer of the long-forgotten days of dial-up. However, the big difference between the PC and the mobile platform is that the handset-based Internet will evolve much more rapidly than the fixed Internet.”
Given this, Boom does not expect the evolution of the mobile Internet to take anywhere near as long as it has taken the PC to become a widely used service. “It’s very likely that in 10 years time the mobile Internet will have overtaken the fixed service.”
While Yahoo! expects the uptake of mobile Internet services to vary across regions, it believes that the basic communication needs of the consumer to find and organise information quickly will be a driving force. “These are universal needs, albeit the services providing them might be different. But there are some core needs emerging across all regions,” adds Boom.
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