6 - United States: popular, pragmatic and problematic

Summary

Introduction

Despite the enormous popularity and economic success of mobile phone communication in the United States, only slight scholarly attention has been paid to its social aspects (notable exceptions have been the studies of Katz and Aspden, 1998, and Katz, 1999). Researchers can ill-afford to ignore a technology not only that has been so widely adopted around the world, but whose success seems to have soared beyond even the most enthusiastic projections of those American companies that created the technology in the first place. AT&T, which first developed cellular technology in the early 1980s, estimated that the US market would in year 2000 be 1 million users. This figure was revised in mid-1994 to 120 million mobile phone users worldwide by 1999 (Common Carrier Week, June 6, 1994). In fact the figure was 97 million in June 2000 in the United States alone, and in mid-2001 there were 118 million US subscribers, according to the Cellular Telephone Industry Association (CTIA, 2000, 2001). Penetration is expected to grow to 176 million or 60% in 2004 and 232 million or 76% in 2009 (Paul Kagan Associates, 1999). Although these are impressive numbers, they pale in comparison with Finland's robust 69% penetration rate (Quinn, 1999).

Allied Business Intelligence (1999) estimated that Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) equipped mobile phones would be 12% of the market in 2000 and 33% by 2005. WAP is one of protocols that are being developed to allow mobile phone access to the Internet.