The surge of apps on the i-phone, android and others makes for a tremendous business case. I mean who was missing the telephone applications till 5 years ago? Let alone that, who was missing the 3-G and the 4-G networks in the first place? At least not the millions of people using it now. Heck, not even thousands of those who test out early-beta versions of these apps even when they are not stable or recommended.
The telecom companies had excess bandwidth, and they didn't know how to monetise it because there were not so many subscribers. So they needed a way to increase the usage per subscriber and that was not going to happen with voice. Then data came in, trickling at first and then flooding all of a sudden. There was always a basic need to let people be connected all the time and mobile phones helped us connect through voice calls. The early adopters of mobile phones, people who were on the move, needed internet connections to check email anyway. They carried a laptop and a mobile phone which was speaking for itself like an opportunity. So, the first applications helped people connect to internet for email. When it really became affordable, people started devising other ways of using this. People on trains used it to check on news, others used it to chat. People used their idle time to play online games, others used it to catch up on emails.
Enterprising people took it as an opportunity and started writing applications that made it easy for people to do these things and much more. And when you hear of people doing financial transactions on the mobile, and new age banks propagating their apps to people for banking, you know that "internet on mobile" has really come of age.
