Cell Phones Step in Where Wi-Fi Falters

So much Internet, so many wireless ways to get it: A battle is intensifying over which methods will dominate, and the outcome could determine how people surf the Web for years to come.

One method for cable-free navigation — connecting through a cellular phone network — got a boost two weeks ago when a group of companies and the GSM Association, an industry lobby, promised to spend $1 billion to market a new initiative to make laptop computers wireless-ready without using Wi-Fi technology.

A day earlier, a competing technology called WiMax — which uses its own tower-based infrastructure to offer broadband wireless Internet connections — received its own vote of confidence when, after billions of dollars in investment, Sprint Nextel began offering the service in Baltimore, the first large WiMax roll-out in the United States.

For now, the two methods are co-existing. But just as Sony’s Blu-ray stamped out Toshiba’s HD DVD format in digital video, and VHS defeated Beta in videocassettes, in a few years only one standard may be left standing.

“There will inevitably be competition and coexistence between cellular and WiMax operators for mobile broadband,” said Berge Ayvazian, chief strategy officer at Yankee Group, a technology consulting firm based in Boston.

The GSM Association’s cellphone network initiative — which is also backed by Microsoft and the computer makers Dell, Lenovo and Toshiba — will market laptop PCs in 91 countries that will be ready to connect wirelessly straight out of the box, without the need to be in range of a Wi-Fi hotspot.

Integrating mobile broadband Internet access into computers is part of a wider strategy to add the same access to MP3 players, digital cameras, cars, refrigerators and other products.

The new laptops will have a spot for a SIM card, probably behind the battery — much as with a GSM telephone….