It was a familiar refrain: The U.S., the birthplace of the Internet, was a wireless backwater. Even early in this decade, many viewed the U.S. as a developing market, fit mostly for hand-me-downs from the more advanced Europeans and Asians. Unlike unified Europe, the U.S. market was fractured by warring radio standards and dotted with dead zones. Long after cellular was a way of life elsewhere, Americans still carried beepers and left messages saying to call cell phones only in emergencies. America was to be pitied, and the competitive upshot was huge: The next great innovations in wireless, including the mobile Internet, were likely to arrive from outside the U.S.
Yet the competitive balance is shifting. As the focus of the wireless world moves toward Internet communications, the U.S. strength in software, most notably at Google and Apple, is pushing the U.S. ahead as a laboratory for wireless development. American users are catching up, too. In the past year, the U.S. surpassed Western Europe in the number of subscribers to the high-speed networks known as 3G, according to consultancy comScore M:Metrics. “The industry needs to stop talking about the gap between the U.S. and Europe,” says Kanishka Agarwal, vice-president of mobile media at Nielsen. “We have caught up, and we have already passed.”
The change has been dramatic. While a year ago 6 percent of Americans who bought phones purchased smartphones, capable of Web access and application downloads, their ranks rose to 16 percent in early 2008, according to consultancy Nielsen Mobile’s survey of 70,000 U.S. wireless subscribers. Over the same time, in Western Europe, the jump in recent smartphone buyers was smaller, from 11 percent to 17 percent, according to Nielsen.
Stride for Stride With Europe
The U.S. is now neck and neck with Western Europe in use of short text messages [SMS],…