A Decade of Mobile

The fabled “year of mobile” may never have fully materialized, but in many ways, the past 10 years have been a decade of mobile. As the ‘00s draw to a close, it’s worth putting the advances mobile has made in context.

A simple measure of that progress (although by no means the only one) is the number of mobile subscriptions per 100 people. According to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), that figure stood at 12.1% globally in 2000; by the end of 2009, it had risen to an estimated 67%, representing around 4.6 billion total mobile subscriptions.

Granted, people can and do have more than one subscription, making for some double-counting inevitable, but the overall trend itself is unmistakable: nearly six-fold growth in the space of 10 years, far outpacing that of any other personal communication technology. In that span of time, mobile devices have evolved rapidly from a luxury good to a basic necessity – a portable communication and information lifeline.

Today, we view that evolution – the addition of more features and capabilities coupled with a steady reduction in the price of both mobile devices and services – as a given. But at the start of the decade, much of what we now take for granted seemed almost fanciful.

Browsing through the eMarketer report archives, I came upon the following snippet from the March 2000 “eGlobal Report”:

Currently, data offered over mobile phones is limited and slow; the phones download data at only 9,600 bits per second, a fifth of the speed of a standard modem. However, this is all about to change. In the coming year, applications and portals built around the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) standard will begin to expand the market by bringing millions of new Internet users online, creating new markets for messaging, advertising, and e-commerce, and changing the geography and demographics of Web users.

By 2002, the introduction of high-speed mobile networks will allow
small cell phones to display full color, high-resolution video, albeit on a relatively tiny screen. Third-generation devices will truly make wireless phones useful Internet viewers. These technologies will allow downloading at 2 million bits per second, 40 times faster than today’s 56K modems. They will still rely on specially formatted content and will lack the clarity and screen size of a PC. However, the most advanced devices will open the way to a wide range of functions people use the Internet for – everything from entertainment to video conferencing to personalized advertising beamed to you on the commute home from the office.

We were right about the general trend, but like many analysts, wrong about the timeline. It took devices and networks a little longer to develop those capabilities and make them available at an affordable price. And likewise, businesses and consumers lagged in taking full advantage of the medium. But eventually, we made a lot of the strides predicted in 2000. To again put that evolution in context, eMarketer predicts there will be 657 million mobile Internet users globally in 2010. That’s nearly equal to the number of total mobile subscribers in 2000.

Mobile enters the next decade with a lot of momentum behind it, but as I discussed here on the eMarketer blog and in my recent iMedia Connection column, there’s still plenty of work to be done, gaps to be bridged and problems to be solved. Mobile device, access, content and advertising markets remain in a state of flux.

The central challenge device manufacturers, marketers and publishers alike face today and the years ahead is making content available where, when and how their end users want to consume it. Thanks to the advent of ubiquitous wireless broadband networks and an expanding range of portable Internet access platforms, solutions, increasingly, must be anywhere and anytime.