Mobile broadband has "peaked", according to Carphone Warehouse

Mobile broadband is a fad which we'll all be over by next week - that seems to be roughly the message from Carphone Warehouse this week.

Carphone has restructured its business over the last couple of years; spinning its mobile retail arm off into a joint venture with US company Best Buy. And with with its energies now clearly focused on fixed broadband, the company's chief executive Charles Dunstone had some disparaging things to say about the future of mobile broadband.

"We get a sense that the mobile broadband thing has peaked. We are seeing some of those people begin to realise that the bandwidth you get on mobile is so much less than you get on a fixed line" he commented, continuing "It was a boom and it is stabilising now. Mobile broadband is increasingly a supplementary rather than a substitutional thing, and we are seeing that an increasing proportion of the sales within Carphone are of pre-pay dongles."

Carphone's fixed-line business TalkTalk is reporting sales growth for its second quarter running, adding 77,000 new fixed-line customers in the last three months. The figures are better than expected, with some analysts having predicted that the recession would slow fixed-line subscriptions to a standstill - and Dunstone clearly believes that mobile broadband can't expect to rival such a buoyant market.

But while the tendency towards pay-as-you-go options isn't encouraging for the mobile broadband industry, few would argue that mobile broadband was ever really mooted as a replacement for fixed-line alternatives - yet, anyway. The slower speed of mobile broadband and coverage issues in some areas mean that at present, mobile broadband is a supplementary service, with its strength being in allowing customers to get online on the move. But with mobile broadband technology moving forwards all the time, there could come a day in the not too distant future when it does become a realistic alternative.

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