Ericsson sez WiFi hotspots to go - yeah right...

According to Erisson, the WiFi hotspot is an endangered species, says InfoWorld:

As mobile broadband takes off, Wi-Fi hotspots will become as irrelevant as telephone booths, Ericsson Chief Marketing Officer Johan Bergendahl said Monday.

Mobile broadband is growing faster than mobile or fixed telephony ever did, Bergendahl said.

"In Austria they are saying that mobile broadband will pass fixed broadband this year. It's already growing faster, and in Sweden, the most popular phone is a USB modem," said Bergendahl, who was the keynote speaker at the European Computer Audit, Control and Security Conference in Stockholm.

As more people start using mobile broadband, hot spots will no longer be needed. "Hotspots at places like Starbucks are becoming the telephone boxes of the broadband era," said Bergendahl.

A couple of factors will accelerate the move to mobile broadband. In countries such as Austria, Denmark, and Sweden, the average price for a mobile broadband subscription is only €20 ($31) per month, Bergendahl said.

Now hold it right there!

He's right if you compare commercial hotspot prices and don't look too closely at how much bandwidth you can buy with a mobile deal, they are usually capped quite low, whereas fixed line tends to be far better "as much as you can eat" deals for similar prices.

He also ignores the growth of free wifi, that is increasingly common in Europe as non-Starbucks places cotton on to the near-zero marginal cost of providing it (the US has been increasingly well supplied for awhile) as a customer attraction. It's not great but its growing.

And at home, how many computers can you hook off a broadband WiFi router? And at what marginal price?

Don't get me wrong - I have 3G and WiFi as a mobile webworker, but I only use 3G when there is no WiFi signal as 3G works out to be far more expenive on a per bit level, espacially if you exceed quota (and 3G also seems to struggle to upload large files)....and 3G coverage - even in a place like the UK - is not that much to shout about either, believe me.

And don't even begin to talk about roaming, which is the closest thing to legal extortion we see in the modern 1st world