Not long ago, the mobile internet was something out of the ordinary. Today, telecom operators continue to increase the download speed thanks to the development of mobile broadband networks, so that the amounts of data transmitted by portable devices increase exponentially. While the mobile internet creates enormous communicational opportunities and becomes more easily accessible, there still exist some difficulties on the way to the all-encompassing fast and qualitative mobile internet coverage.
The advent of the mobile Internet is directly related to the development of mobile technologies. The first relatively limited but still working technology was WAP, which allowed to get Internet access through mobile operators and pay only for downloaded information (Mennecke & Strader, 2002). WAP nowadays is considered not a very successful initiative. Gao, Hyytinen and Toivanen in their research state that such failure was caused not by the low connection speed or absence of consumer demand but rather by groundlessly high prices (2014, p. 484). With the development of GPRS, the mobile internet became much faster and affordable. GPRS functioned on the principle similar to the ordinary Internet: the data was divided into packets and sent to the recipient and are assembled there. GPRS later was improved, and the EDGE technology was established (Ergen, 2009).
With the emergence of 3G in 2001 and later establishment of smart mobile devices, the mobile Internet entered into a new era. Nowadays, 3G covers major cities of the world and their suburbs. 3G is as well based on packet data but operates at ultra-high frequencies transmitting data at speeds up to 10 Mbit/s (Bidgoli, 2008). Of course, 3G was not the limit and ITC providers gradually developed and turned to even faster and more qualitative standard 4G. For the International Telecommunication Union, 4G is as a wireless communication technology that allows to transmit data at speed up to 1 Gbit/s by stationary objects and up to 100 Mbit/s by mobile devices (International Telecommunication Union, n.d.).
According to the Internet Society recent report, such development will cause the mobile internet spread of 71% worldwide by 2019 (2015, p. 9). However, this penetration will not be free from difficulties. The main problem with the mobile internet nowadays is that the volume of traffic in mobile networks is growing much faster than the operators build the required infrastructure (Bechmann & Lomborg, 2014). One may have paid attention to the fact that in crowded public places mobile internet runs either very slowly does not work at all. This phenomenon is akin to a traffic jam – the operator infrastructure limits are tightly stuffed by the subscriber traffic. The traffic on cellular networks confidently shows exponential growth, which rates from 50 to 100% in different countries, and the end to this trend is not visible. The primary reason of such “capacity crunch” is the smartphone revolution that led to the spread of mobile use popular services. Moreover, mobile traffic is consumed and generated more and more uneven in space; this further aggravates the lack of capacity of cellular networks in the “hot spots” (Rodriguez, 2015).
As Frietshe notes, the main problems of the mobile internet are “an adequate quality of service and a reasonable level of security” (2013, p. 122). Indeed, the access issues, personal information exposure, mobile cyber attacks become significant threats to the mobile internet users (Internet Society, 2015). Their devices become their alter ego and the harm caused to them may affect the person significantly.
In general, the rise of mobile internet consumption will bring both positive and negative consequences for operators and users. On the one hand, smartphone users become directly dependent on access to the Internet in carrying out their daily tasks. On the other hand, the operators will have to invest more in the infrastructure of new networks and to optimize the existing ones, as the average revenue per user will decline due to competition and other factors.
References
Bechmann, A., & Lomborg, S. (2014). The ubiquitous Internet: User and industry perspectives. New York, NY: Routledge.
Bidgoli, H. (2008). Handbook of computer networks. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Ergen, M. (2009). Mobile broadband including WiMAX and LTE. New York, NY: Springer Verlag.
Frietshe, W. (2013). IPv6 based mobile routing. In C. McDonald (Ed.), Converged networking: Data and real-time communications over IP (pp. 121-145). New York, NY: Springer Publishing.
Gao, M., Hyytinen, A., & Toivanen, O. (2014). Problems in launching the mobile internet: Evidence from a pricing experiment. Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, 23(3), 483-506.
International Telecommunication Union. (n.d.). What really is a third generation (3G) mobile technology. Web.
Internet Society. (2015). Global internet report 2015: Mobile evolution and development of the internet. Web.
Mennecke, B., & Strader, T. (2002). Mobile commerce technology, theory, and applications. Hershey, PA: Idea Group.
Rodriguez, J. (2015). Fundamentals of 5G mobile networks. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons.