Analysts: Hundreds of billions in wireless productivity gains

Last Friday, an Ovum Research report added an additional $260 billion to its 2005 forecast of $600 billion in productivity gains that wireless technology is expected to add to the American economy over the next ten years.

In an interview with BetaNews Monday, Ovum analyst Roger Entner attributed some of the disparity between the two numbers to "faster adoption and more applications than originally expected," and the rest to a slight difference in the time frames studied in the two reports.

"Only ten years ago, people were wondering what wireless phones could do for them. Now, they can't live without [wireless phones]," Entner noted during a recent webcast.

There is a slight time adjustment: The "2005 Ovum Report on the Impact of the US Wireless Telecom Industry on the US Economy" projected gains for a ten-year period that would end in 2015; last Friday's follow-up extends that period to 2016. "Other than that, though, the comparison is as 'apples to apples' as possible," Entner told us.

Future productivity gains will be particularly evident among small businesses and in the health care industry, according to the Ovum analyst. Factors playing into the productivity increases will range from emerging wireless broadband services to faster and more efficient decision-making, improvements in logistics, "reductions of unproductive travel time," and replacement of landline phones.

Also in the updated report, Ovum predicts that by 2016, the US will have 81 million mobile wireless enterprise users -- and that 83 percent of them will be outfitted with wireless broadband.