Wi-Fi Smartphones to Dominate

Today, about half the smartphones sold have Wi-Fi. By 2014, the forecast goes, about 90 percent of smartphones will offer access to Wi-Fi.

The Apple iPhone helped show why it's good for a cell phone to have Wi-Fi.

(Credit: Apple)

The big driver for Wi-Fi is bandwidth-intensive multimedia applications, such as graphically intense games and streaming video. The Apple iPhone was among the first devices to show the true benefit of having Wi-Fi. AT&T, the exclusive carrier offering the iPhone in the U.S., has said that iPhone subscribers consume more data than any other people using its wireless service, even other smartphone customers.

And because of these heavy traffic loads on its overburdened 3G network, AT&T is encouraging all its iPhone subscribers to access its more than 20,000 Wi-Fi hot spots for free. The hope is that the company can offload some of the traffic onto the Wi-Fi network by encouraging subscribers to use Wi-Fi for data-intensive activities when they're in range of a hot spot.

"In the age of data-centric multimedia phones, carriers have embraced Wi-Fi technology as a way to offload traffic from licensed spectrum and improve the consumer experience," Michael Morgan, industry analyst for ABI Research, said in a statement. "We are seeing handset users starting to demand Wi-Fi because of its higher data rate and indoor reception benefits."