Most people will access the internet via mobile by 2020
Wireless devices will be the primary means of connecting to the internet for most people by 2020, according to a new report by Pew Internet and American Life.
There will be around four billion mobile phones worldwide by the end of this year, around 15% of which are internet-enabled, according the Pew report.
“By 2020, we’ll have standard network connections around the world. Billions of people will have joined the internet who don’t speak English. They won’t think of these things as ‘phones’ either – these devices will be simply lenses on the online world,” said Susan Crawford, founder of OneWebDay and an Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) board member, within the report.
A number of industry representatives agree that future mobile phone handsets will function more as a computer than a phone.
“By 2020 I don’t think it will be so easy to distinguish between a mobile phone and a laptop,” said Steve Jones, co-founder of the Association of Internet Researchers and associate dean at the University of Illinois-Chicago. “These will blend into a general ‘mobile computing’ category of device.”
The report found that the trend of handheld computers has already started with handsets like the iPhone and the BlackBerry, though these are still mostly limited to business users.
However, not all the experts featuring in Pew’s survey agreed with its future of mobile prediction, some expressed doubts over open networks, bandwidth and screen sizes.
Hal Varian, chief economist at Google, said: “The big problem with the cell phone is the UI (user interface), particularly on the data side. We are waiting for a breakthrough.”
Other key findings from the survey suggested that voice-recognition technology and touchscreens for the internet will be more prevalent by 2020.
The report also predicts that the divide between personal and work time and physical and virtual reality will be further erased, with mixed results for social relations.
Last month, Tuned In released data showing that the mobile phone is the favoured digital device among young people (see Mobile phones are the most popular digital device among young people).
The study found that 42% of people expect to use the internet on their mobile more in the future, suggesting an appetite for this does exist and an expectation that prices will fall and quality will be improved.
However, Tuned In also said that around a third (36%) of all the 16-30s had yet to use their mobile to access the internet. Cost and speed were cited as the primary obstacles to use, with 74% saying they would surf the internet on their mobile more if it were cheaper and 59% complaining that the slow speed of the connection put them off.
Despite Tuned In’s research, the overall number of Britons using mobile internet increased by 25% from Q2 to Q3 (from 5.8 to 7.3 million), compared to 3% for PC-based internet (34.3 to 35.3 million Britons) (see Increase in Britons using mobile internet).
According the data from Nielsen Online, the mobile internet audience has a higher concentration of younger users than PC-based internet – 25% of mobile internet consumers are aged 15-24 compared to 16% for PC-based consumers.
However, the research also found that 23% of the PC-based internet population is 55+, while only 12% of the mobile internet audience is.