Patterns of Global Diffusion of M-Commerce Technology

Patterns of Global Diffusion of M-Commerce Technology

While the statistics above indicate hyperbolic growth and proliferating applications of mobile technologies, global diffusion patterns vary widely. First, uses of mobile phones vary between low- and high-income countries. People in the developing countries often use mobile phones because these may be the only kind of phones available readily (Wooldridge, 1999); and in many regions of Eastern Europe, the mobile phone network is often much more technologically advanced than the older fixed-line network. Thus, while mobile phones represent supplements to fixed telephones in high-income economies, they are often substitutes for fixed telephones in lower-income economies (ITU, 1997). Likewise, whereas 3G mobile phones provide mobility and efficiency to the users from advanced countries, they are likely to give a large proportion of people from the developing world their first access to the Internet (Banks, 2001). In other words, the developing countries are gravitating to mobile phones because of infrastructure issues (Zuckerman, 2000). In some developing countries, such as Cambodia and Venezuela, mobile penetration already exceeds fixed-line penetration.

For this and for additional reasons examined below, global leaders in mobile technology and m-commerce are not necessarily the richest economies or the leaders in fixed telecommunications and the Internet. Compared in Table 1 are 25 major countries in terms of mobile penetration, fixed-line penetration, Internet usage, and per capita income. Portugal and Taiwan, for instance, have incomes that are less than one third of the incomes of Japan, Switzerland, and the United States, but they are far ahead in terms of mobile penetration. Similarly, Italy has one of the lowest rates of fixed-line penetration (Table 1) but ranks fourth in terms of mobile penetration. Hong Kong, the economy with the highest mobile penetration in the world, has a relatively low rank in terms of Internet usage. As indicated in Table 1, whereas income, fixed telephone penetration, and Internet penetration are significantly correlated with each other, none of these variables has a significant correlation with mobile phone penetration in terms of Spearman's rank correlation coefficient.

Nations vary considerably in the penetration of mobile Internet access compared to fixed-line telecommunications and fixed-line Internet access. Whereas the United States has been a global leader in overall Internet access, it lags far behind Europe and the advanced economies of the Asia-Pacific region in terms of mobile Internet access (Table 2). One reason for this is that fixed-line access is relatively cheap and generally not metered in the United States, whereas mobile Internet access is more expensive and largely metered. In most other developed countries, the continued prevalence of per-minute-billing of fixed-telephone-line usage makes calling plans for mobile phones comparatively attractive. The success of Japan's i-mode, beyond the indisputable technical merits of the service, is attributable in large part to the high cost and modest penetration of fixed-line Internet access. In fact, the adoption of mobile technology does not follow any single universal logic or pattern. While mobile technology in advanced nations is usually a successor or a complement to earlier generations of telecommunications, in developing parts of the world, to varying degrees, it represents an infrastructure alternative to fixed-line communications.