We knew we lived in a wireless world, so studies of increases in the number of Americans accessing the Internet wirelessly shouldn't come as a big surprise. But the Pew Research Center has attempted to put some numbers to the rate of wireless adoption, and Pew's recent Internet & American Life Project survey says 56 percent of adult Americans have accessed the Internet through a wireless device, meaning everything from gaming consoles to smartphones to their personal laptop.
Laptops are the most popular way of wirelessly getting online, Pew's researchers said, with 39 percent of the survey's 2,253 participants (American adults aged 18 and older) choosing it as the most common access point. The most interesting stat from Pew, however, is in the mobile handset category, where about 32 percent of survey participants said they'd used some kind of mobile handset to access wireless Internet. That's a pretty sizeable increase since December 2007, when Pew's survey data had the number of survey participants using mobile Internet at 24 percent.
Pew also found that about 19 percent of Americans surf the Net on their mobile device on a daily basis, which is up from the 11 percent who reported doing so in December 2007. The role of the mobile phone is also changing, according to Pew's survey; 69 percent of participants said they use their phone for at least one function other than voice phone calls, such as playing games, taking pictures or shooting video, or text messaging. The comparable statistic from Pew's December 2007 study was about 58 percent.
If there's a particular American adult demographic using mobile Internet at a greater rate than any other, according to Pew, it's African Americans. Pew's survey found that mobile Web use by African Americans adults alone was 48 percent, far higher than the 32 percent of adults overall. The 48 percent was up from 29 percent of African american respondents in 2007, a much more dramatic change than the jump from 21 percent (2007) to 28 percent (2009) of respondents describing themselves as white.
The report and others like it come at a time when wireless mobile Internet has long since transcended luxury status and become an essential business and consumer tool.
"Mobile access strengthens the three pillars of online engagement: connecting with others, satisfying information queries, and sharing content with others," said John B. Horrigan, associate director of the Pew Internet Project and principal author of the report, in a statement. "With access in their pockets, many Americans are 'on the fly' consumers and producers of digital information."
