According to the latest findings by IDC, consumers are increasingly using mobile devices as their default gateway to the Internet.
The United States leads that trend, with Western Europe and Japan only about two years behind, IDC says.
In the U.S., the number of people accessing the Internet through PCs will shrink from 240 million consumers in 2012 to 225 million in 2016. At the same time, the number of mobile users will increase from 174 million to 265 million.
Incredibly, the report projects that in 2015, there will be more U.S. consumers accessing the Internet through mobile devices than through PCs. This will be the first time that such a pattern will have taken shape.
“In the consumer world, mobile Internet usage is already beginning to displace PC usage, and the United States is leading this trend,” says one IDC official. “There has been much talk about how the future of the Internet will be mobile first and PC second. In the United States, that future is now.”
