Wi-Fi hotspots, RIP

It's debatable whether video really did kill the radio star, but mobile broadband seems to have driven a stake through the heart of wireless hotspots.

Johan Bergendahl, chief marketing officer for Ericsson, called for last rites this week when he described hotspots as the mobile Internet equivalent of the public phone box.

Ericsson's Johan Bergendahl: "Hotspots are becoming the telephone boxes of the broadband era""Hotspots at places like Starbucks are becoming the telephone boxes of the broadband era" Bergendahl claimed during a keynote address at an industry confab in Stockholm. Led by the increasing speeds and more importantly decreasing prices for 3G-based mobile broadband, Bergendahl predicted that "in a few years, (HSDPA) will be as common as Wi-Fi is today."

Well, you'd expect him to say things along those lines - Ericsson provides the hardware behind many HSDPA networks, including Telstra's Next G and Vodafone's forthcoming national mobile broadband network (which is expected to deliver 14.4Mbps to 95% of the population by December this year).

Bergendahl's statement would be challenged in the US plus parts of Europe and Asia where public Wi-Fi access points are both free and widely available. Although even in such circumstances, he says that as 3G and perhaps WiMAX start to become built into everything from laptops to mobile Internet devices, you won't need to hunt down a hotspot because Internet access will be everywhere you are.

But here in Australia, where public Wi-Fi points are rarely free nor frequently seen, hotspots long ago became irrelevant to the needs of most notebook users.

Local hotspot prices are laughable. Telstra, the dominant player, gouges customers between $12 to $14 per hour. Optus is slightly less appallingly overpriced, with rates from $10-$12 per hour depending on if you're a casual walk-up user or have signed up to a wireless LAN plan (Telstra scrapped its hotspot subscription plan in August last year, in an effort to steer customers onto Next G). Azure charges a more realistic average of $6 per hour but doesn't have hotspots in the crucial locations like airports.

Hot to trot: At up to $14 an hour for access to Telstra's hotspots, he'll need something stronger than coffee in that cup!There would certainly be many one-off hotspots where the rates are even lower, but if you're on the road you want to be able to rely on a network of hotspots at known and easily accessible locations.

Now compare that to Australia's best bargains in the mobile broadband battle.

You can pay just $29 per month to get 2GB on 3, or $39 for 5GB on Vodafone. Both under a 24 month contract admittedly, but with a USB modem thrown in for free. Both networks run on 3.6Mbps HSDPA, and in recent testing around Sydney and North Sydney, both indoors and outdoors, I averaged 1.8Mbps for 3 and 1.3Mbps for Vodafone.

No brainer: hunt down a hotspot for $6-$14 per hour, or enjoy mobile broadband for $30-$40 per monthSo you can hunt down a Wi-Fi hotspot and pay between $6-$14 per hour, depending on which provider runs the hotspot, or you can pay $30-$40 per month and get mobile broadband almost anywhere around the greater city area, with download allowances large enough for frequent usage, as long as you're not trying to do anything like P2P or movie downloads.

If we're paying the bill, that's not much of a contest.

[Of course, if you're wanting Wi-Fi on a real budget - by which we mean free - you just need to know where to look. Internode offers free access to its CityLAN wireless grid in Adelaide, and there's an ever-growing list of free hotspots at Whirlpool, not to mention the free WiFi service announced today for Sydney CBD's 10 city libraries.]