In recent years the world has been lucky, or unlucky, enough to witness three different, but related, technological evolutions of ubiquity: the Internet, the cell phone, and the currently evolving Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) devices.
The Internet was first developed by the United States Department of Defence in the height of the Cold War. The purpose of the Internet, at that time called Advanced Research Project Association (ARPANET), was to have a distributed system of networked computers, such that if any one of the nodes were destroyed, the data would still be able to reach its destination without being lost by finding an alternate route. Originally linking the government computers, and extended to the various universities across the country, it was an interesting research and communications tool.
At around the same time, commercial interest was being developed for consumers through on-line services such as Prodigy, and America On-Line. These on-line services were subscription based and use the ``consumer-as-commodity''[10, p. 277] model already in place through magazine subscriptions and television networks. These first on-line networks were internal, and not connected to the Internet. By around 1994, these services started providing rudimentary access to the Internet through e-mail. In only two short years, the Internet went from purely academic based to consumer based. Currently, the Internet is a major business. In the commercial world, if you do not have a world wide web address (WWW) or e-mail address, you can wish a farewell to your business.
Cell phones were at one point quite large and expensive. While the average U.S. consumer was spending several dollars each call, Israeli counterparts were spending a mere ten cents per call. Much like the evolution of the credit card in the consumer economy, the cell phone was first restricted to the very wealthy, or affluent. By 1996, Tandy Corporation owned stores like Radio Shack and Computer City, were literally giving away the phones for only a penny. There was a caveat though; the consumer had to sign a one year contract, and would only get about thirty minutes of talk time for a monthly average fee of forty dollars. If the consumer went over the thirty minutes they would have to spend several dollars each minute.
A year later the Sprint telephone company, specialising in long distance services, presumably due to the increased competition stemming from the de-regulation of the local services, entered the wireless market as Sprint PCS, a joint venture including Comcast Cable and two other telephone companies. Their nationwide campaign, opening a metropolitan center at a time, was conducted under a different marketing strategy than the other wireless companies. While the other wireless companies were reimbursing stores like Radio Shack for the cost per unit of the telephone, some $300 USD, in exchange for a yearly contract from the consumer, Sprint PCS decided to cut the costs of the telephone in half, selling directly to the consumer with no yearly contracts.
For around $150 USD nationally and without the threat of a yearly contract, the consumer became more receptive to buying a wireless phone. Sprint PCS started guerilla marketing to push the new phones by offering special packages. One such package was to give the consumer more minutes than they could possibly use in a month, for slightly higher monthly fees. For example, the consumer would purchase a plan for a monthly fee of fifty dollars, which would include 500 minutes of talk-time, free call waiting, caller id, call forwarding, voice mail. Since the release of Sprint PCS's service coincided with the boom of the Internet, they continually used the buzzword `digital' to describe the type of service they were offering and how it differed from conventional wireless phones.
The next technological progression in recent history seems to be that of WAP devices. WAP is a general term to describe anything that consumer can carry in the palm of their hand, with which to connect to the Internet. This includes Internet enabled cellular phones, and hand held personal digital assistants (PDA).