"Mobile Internet is and will be bigger than most think"

At the Web 2.0 Summit this week in San Francisco, Mary Meeker, a well-regarded technology analyst for Morgan Stanley gave a pretty fascinating presentation on the state of the Economy and the Internet and current trends regarding the mobile Internet.

If you skip to slide 28, you'll find the beginning of the mobile Web analysis, with the first sentence being, "Mobile Internet is and will be bigger than most think."

If you keep skimming to slide 55, you'll find an explanation for the following statement: "Carriers in the U.S. and W. Europe face surging demand but uncertain economics." Meekers says the number of heavy mobile data users will likely triple to 1 billion by 2013.

Another interesting tidbit: Facebook was the largest share gainer of online usage over the past three years. Meanwhile, AT&T's mobile data traffic increased 50 times, or nearly 5,000 percent, in the past three years.

And a thought that is directly related to the current debate over net neutrality: "Regulators can help advance/slow mobile Internet evolution." On slide 59, Meeker says the key question is whether regulators will allow the continued blocking of bandwidth-intensive apps on mobile or leave it up to mobile operators to adopt tiered bandwidth pricing.

Mary Meeker's Internet Presentation 2009