After two years of rapid growth, mobile broadband, the wireless industry’s most successful innovation of the past decade, is at a crossroads as operators struggle to maintain fast, omnipresent service in the face of exploding Internet traffic.Since mid-2007, when the first services came on the market, about 16 million people worldwide have signed up for mobile broadband, according to Screen Digest, an industry researcher. In 2008, the number of subscribers almost doubled.But the rapid deployment — and mounting Internet traffic from video streaming and file sharing — have caused many wireless broadband services to slow down or interrupt from data overload.To read this report from The New York Times in full, see:
nytimes.com/2009/06/16/technology/internet/16srtech.html