Wireless to be Led by Same Old Apps

A survey by Cahners In-Stat Group of nearly 500 senior executives from companies from various sizes and industries found that the applications driving the wireless Internet movement are email access, Web browsing, and pull content (aka Web clipping).

The current growth trend in the wireless Internet market stems from the wider availability of portable computing and communications products, and the fact that key barriers such as performance, geographic coverage, and cost are being surmounted, according to Cahners.

One of the applications that will not be driving the wireless market is videoconferencing.

“Videoconferencing will not be a key driver for next generation wireless implementation because it does not meet the initial criteria of being essential to productivity like email, Web browsing, and pull content,” said Rebecca Diercks, director of In-Stats’s wireless service. “Videoconferencing will not develop into a mainstream portable application until it becomes more prevalent in wireline devices. Even today, videoconferencing is most often reserved for the corporate elite.”

Nearly 90 percent of the respondents to the survey said they would like wireless Internet access to both send and receive email, and two-thirds of this group stated that it is either very important or extremely important to view attachments in wireless email received on a portable device.

Almost 80 percent are extremely or very interested in wireless Web browsing, with 88 percent of these respondents saying they are interested in both text and graphic capabilities. Nearly 70 percent want access to pull content off of the Web, In-Stat found.

The demand for high-speed Internet access will be the key driver for next generation implementation, with half the respondents surveyed stating that they require wireless speeds equal to wired speeds, and with another 28 percent demanding speeds faster than wired.

Videoconferencing and CD-quality music will remain niche applications, with fewer than 40 percent of the respondents interested in the application for their next generation wireless devices.

Although widely touted, In-Stat found that push content services such as news, weather, financial, and sports score information will not be as popular as consumers gain the ability to pull content off the Web on an as-needed basis.