According Reportlinker.com in January 2007 there were an estimated 2.7 billion mobile handsets in use around the world, of which 1 billion were sold during 2006. This is more than three times the number of PCs, and roughly double the number of fixed landlines in use. And most of these handsets have the processing power of yesteryear’s PCs.



The wireless sector can no longer be discharged as merely a sub-segment of telecom or a niche-channel to reach young geeks. It is a market all in its own, both in size and value, and any service, product, company, brand or entity needs a strategy for its digital, mobile phone-based presence. Being absent from the mobile internet should be a conscientious choice, not one made by neglect, as it might mean giving your competitors the most direct and personal access to your customers, irregardless of who they are. The connected handset will become a natural and convenient internet terminal in any situation, including at home. In addition, while the PC has become an evermore generic appliance sold in supermarkets, the mobile phone is an expression of one’s personality, a fashion statement, always connected and particularly addictive, and it is in the pocket of basically every young, urban person around the world. Reportlinker.com believes that as technical limitations on mobile terminals and networks dissipate, user behaviours and business models will in all essential follow the same evolution path for the mobile internet as they have in the fixed world. The Western mobile Internet user is also a heavy user of the fixed Internet, shaping behaviour and expectations on services and interfaces. However, mobile surfing is not a replacement activity for fixed access, but rather a complementary channel with a different user experience and context. When the dust settles after the current battle for small screen presence, the users will ultimately care less whether their host is an internet brand player, a mobile operator or a media company, as long as the service offers more. Reportlinker.com believes that the winners on the mobile web arena will be the players that give the users what they have come to expect from the Internet, i.e. browsing, e-mail, IM, media and networking, but in addition manage to exploit the inherit differentiators of surfing-on-the-go – such as instantaneity, personalisation, location, efficiency in presentation – into added service value, context sensitivity and a superior user experience.

Network operators still have the advantage of owning the relationship to the subscriber and usually have their name on the first screen image the user sees when turning on the phone, but Internet players with strong brands and communities to back them up are moving in on consumers who are used to paying for access and services on different bills. The operators will have to work hard and exploit their strengths cleverly to remain relevant and not become faceless access providers with price as main differentiator.

Although Reportlinker.com believes that any operator trying to keep the mobile user from free access to his or her favourite sites and applications will loose in the long run, portals will continue to be relevant as aggregators of contents and services. Reportlinker.com also predicts that as in the fixed domain, popular portals, search engines, browsers and communities will fuse to leave a few mass-market launch pads for the mobile Internet.

One of the most profound impacts of the Internet is that of evolving the mass media consumer into a peer-to-peer content producer with mobile phones transformed into life recorders, always connected for immediate upload and distribution. Reportlinker.com recommends any Internet player, fix as well as mobile, to consider in what ways its customers can be invited to be creative and interactive. Any service provider should calculate with, and indeed enable, the users to find unexpected and creative ways to use the tools provided.

The publisher believes that one of the most costly mistakes made by many operators is to set business users as the first and primary target for technically advanced mobile services. Today’s corporate mobile internet segment comprises a select elite, and by pricing and packaging an attractive mass-market product for the corporate segment, the service providers miss out on most of their potential customers. However, by avoiding the exclusive label and presenting mobile Internet as the familiar internet on yet another terminal, the immediate market swells to include Internet users of all ages who are also mobile subscribers, a magnification by several factors. This does however dictate a shift towards user-friendly data subscription plans, reasonably priced, non-geeky terminals and intuitive handling.

On the other hand, given the familiarity of Internet services, the addictiveness of always-connectedness and the status of the portable phone as the personal terminal, there are few valid excuses to not succeed in migrating the fixed Internet consumer community to mobile. And the business market will in turn be a relatively effortless high-end dividend in a few years when today’s youth enters the work market with deeply established mobile habits. To the Web 2.0 generation, the business customers of tomorrow, mobile Internet is not a conceptual and futuristic abstraction but an expected staple tool in the infrastructure of their lives. These days, to not know and keep up with what happens on the mobile scene is an oversight that no-one, basically irregardless of business, can afford.