Tim Peter has unearthed an interesting study on Web usage for mobile phones, which leads him to the conclusion that people use their mobile phones to surf the Web in similar ways that they use their computers. In some countries, Web usage on mobile devices far out-paces that in the U.S., and the question remains, why? Why is it that U.S. cell users use their phones to access the Web so little?
In some ways, the phones have been the culprits. Clearly, mobile phones with tiny monochrome screens were unusable, but most people don’t have those old phones anymore. And the high usage of the Web by iPhone owners shows that a really nice device really matters, even if Apple and AT&T are only now getting off that pokey data network onto 3G.
So, bandwidth is up. Devices are better. It’s safe to say that anyone who wants to use the Web on their phone could pony up the money and get that access. So it must be the money.
The $200 for the devices is likely not the inhibitor, given how much people pay for other devices they use a lot less, so it must be the high cost of the carriers. Look at it this way, if Internet Service Providers charged by the megabyte in 1998, do you think the Web would have taken off? It’s the all-you-can-eat model that drove people to use the Web and to use always-on connections without giving things a second thought.
But as long as carriers are charging by the minute or the megabyte, or have some limit to the amount that you can use before the whopper charges kick in, people will be careful about how much they browse on their cell phones. Even after the carriers begin offering all-you-can-eat plans, expect it to take a while for the general public to realize they could change their plan and start using their phones the way they use their computers—anytime they want.
So, I think it will take a couple of years for usage patterns to change. It will take that long for people to learn about the new plans, to get around to upgrading their phone to something that browses the Web well, and to start using it the way they want to. Mobile Web has always seemed a couple of years away, and it still does, but if the carriers get serious about making Web browsing affordable, it might finally be around that corner this time.
