End of the Wi-Fi hotspot: A 21st century telephone booth?

"The telephone boxes of the broadband era," that's what cell phone vendor Ericsson calls Wi-Fi hotspots like those at Starbucks, technology about to be made obsolete by the rapid growth of high-speed cellular networks.

Ericsson of course has a rather expensive horse in this race, as it makes telephone handsets that cell phone network operators would much rather be built to use the cell network instead of not (free and/or off-network) Wi-Fi services. High-speed cell service can cost $60 and up a month in the U.S., while the network operator gets nothing for Wi-Fi users.

But there's a lot of truth in what Ericsson CEO Johan Bergendahl has to say: Wi-Fi has really never been much more than a stopgap technology, especially as far as cell phones are concerned. The range is tiny, the reliability and susceptibility to interference are poor, and the amount of equipment required to blanket a metropolitan area without leaving substantial gaps is cost-prohibitive. Using Wi-Fi is fine for your house, but it makes little sense when traveling, as any hotel dweller who's had to jaunt down to the lobby in the middle of the night in order to use the Wi-Fi connection (because the signal won't reach to his hotel room) can tell you. Now when I go on a trip, I've taken to using a 3G USB card to get online with my laptop instead of shell out the $12 a night for Wi-Fi, even if Wi-Fi is available in the room. (For bonus points: Try getting a reliable Wi-Fi signal at a Vegas hotel during CES.)

Wi-Fi isn't going to die overnight, and it will probably always be with us for home users hooking up to their cable modems. It took the telephone modem five or six years at least to become wholly irrelevant, and the same thing will happen with Wi-Fi. It will probably take longer, since the price of 3G cell service is expensive here, and for people with multiple computers, that really adds up. But should the U.S. really find itself in a cellular price war (which seems not just possible but probable), and prices fall rapidly (the linked story above notes than Austrians pay just 20 euros a month for mobile broadband), 3G could soon become a no-brainer add-on for every laptop buyer, especially since every cell phone will have it too.

What's the price where you'd dump Wi-Fi for 3G?