What is the "Wireless Internet"? 
By Bruno Giussani

Author of "Roam. Making Sense of the Wireless Internet"

What is the "wireless Internet", or the "mobile Internet"? One thing is sure: it is not "the Internet without wires" or "made mobile". The first reason is obvious: by design, handheld devices do not (and never will) offer the same rich user interface and connectivity as the computer. Secondly, wireless networks have severe limitations compared to fixed networks: while it is always possible to expand wireline bandwidth by adding more wires, the radio spectrum is finite, limited both by physics and by the way it has been sliced and allocated to various uses by governments. Moreover, the need for wireless technology to follow the user makes it much more complex and less reliable than its fixed cousin.

On the other hand however, without the swift rise of the Internet in the last decade -- without the huge and wildly diverse base of contents, services, applications and business models it has created, without the massive creative forces it has unleashed, without its making us aware of the value of connectedness -- wireless data would not have the potential it has today.

 

So, what is the "wireless Internet"? We can answer the question starting from a different perspective. Consider the following, simple example: I have just spoken with a colleague on the phone. We set an appointment three days from now, in the afternoon, and have agreed to check in the morning to confirm the exact time and place.

In other words, we have: 1) agreed that there is a strong likelihood that on that day we will both be in the same town, and 2) scribbled on our agendas a temporary, flexible position, which will allow us to meet two hours earlier, or three hours later, or not at all, depending on the events that may have occurred in the meantime. Of course, 3) we both implicitly know that the meeting may or may not happen.

This is not uncommon. Our attitudes towards the organization of our time -- and of our social interactions -- are changing fast, and the main cause is the enormous growth in the use of mobile phones and the unhindered exchange of information that they permit. For an increasing number of people, mobile phones, (and SMS, and email) are becoming a radar of daily life, allowing us to constantly check these positions in our agendas and to rearrange them according to all sorts of new and continually changing elements -- with a correlating impact on our entire matrix of attitudes and behaviours.

This does not mean that we’re becoming incapable of taking a simple decision such as "see you at Starbucks in Central Square at 3 in the afternoon" and sticking to it. It is the organization of time and its social implications that have become much more fluid and volatile, albeit more complex, as technology allows every element to have an effect on every other, and for the whole to be indefinitely reorganized and reshaped in near-real-time. 

What could appear to be a lack of focus is in fact a radical change in the concept of reachability. Wireless communications make us reachable all the time. The commitment to that specific position in the agenda can therefore be poor: both my colleague and I know that through our devices we will be able to work out the details when we really need to, taking into account a lot of information that we don’t have yet but will have accumulated in the intervening time.  

Reach is what the wireless Internet is all about. Two years ago, in a different context, authors Thomas Wurster and Philip Evans put the concept of reach in opposition to that of richness. Richness, in their description, refers to the depth, intensity and bandwidth of the information; reach, to the number of people who participate in sharing it. Consider for example a daily newspaper: it reaches a large number of readers and allows them to share socially relevant information. Its articles, however, contain nowhere near the richness of information offered by specialized trade magazines or scientific publications – which, in return, are read by a far smaller number of people.  

This tension, or trade-off, between reach and richness is likely to be the key force determining the future shape of the wireless Internet. Mobile devices are high-reach: there are a lot of them and they’re always with the user, they’re not shared (when a mobile phone rings, usually nobody but the owner picks it up). But they supply low richness: displays and keyboards are small, computing capabilities are limited, batteries have short lifespans and data transmission speeds will always lag those of wireline networks. The connected desktop computer of course can be described exactly the other way around: it’s information rich while providing only a partial degree of reach. 

The wireless Internet -- mobile commerce and mobile business -- will be about ‘reach’ information and ‘reach’ services.  

Which services? With the obvious exception of messaging in every form and type, nobody today can say for sure which services, contents and applications could become popular features of the wireless Internet. What’s clear is that existing wireline Internet models won’t necessarily translate into the wireless space without major changes, because of the fundamental differences between the fixed and the mobile environments.

The applications and services that are the most likely to succeed are not those that will be built on top of wideband networks in many years, nor those waiting for future handheld devices with larger displays, but those where these limitations are outdone today by the convenience of mobility. In other words, those built around the powerful uniqueness that we’ve described above: reach.