Portable WiFi-enabled electronics are everywhere. An iPod touch gives you your email, the Internet, and even (with the latest generation) voice-over-IP. But you can only connect when you're close enough to a WiFi hot-spot. Take your iPod away from that coffee shop or office and you lose the Internet. You still have a fabulous music player and gaming device, but not a whole lot more. That may be why cellular gadgets are really starting to break into the mainstream.

But, as they do, they face a provider market that's badly fragmented. Carriers get exclusive access to some devices, charge different fees based on the device class, and will happily bill consumers for multiple plans for various specialized devices. Will the carriers sort this out in a way that actually gives consumers what they're looking for?

With an iPhone instead of an iPod, you can roam wherever AT&T offers cellular coverage, although that will cost you at least $70/month with a two year contract. That's a pretty hefty price to pay to keep in touch with e-mail and the rest. AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and other providers all offer a variety of data plans in the US aimed at casual data users, but few are bargains and there's little to distinguish them from heavy-duty tethering plans.

Take AT&T's current netbook plan, which offers data at $60/month with a two year commitment. Sure they'll knock a couple of hundred dollars off the price of a netbook for you. Even so, the $60/month outlay for a device that's not usually used for serious connectivity and computing seems high. Especially since it's nearly the same cost as, if not more than, basic tethering plans. Plus if you exceed the 5G cap, AT&T will charge you hundreds of extra dollars per GB.

Until last Autumn, AT&T offered MEdiaNet Unlimited, providing data for $20/month (provided there was an initial purchase of $100, which kept the account active for the initial year.) AT&T cancelled the plan, explaining that the service was a trial exercise, but I suspect that MEdiaNet Unlimited was killed by its own success. Many users dropped more profitable data plans and switched to it, lowering revenues and raising demand on the data infrastructure.

Kindle and Peek

Even as the carriers continue to push full-service, full-price data plans, ubiquitous computing is finally starting to arrive on single-task gadgets. Amazon's $360 Kindle ships with an already-paid-for data plan. It uses Sprint's national EVDO network to connect to the Web and provide on-the-go sales of e-books. As with any special-purpose device, general Internet use is a compromise—Web browsing is stripped down to the basics.

For $20/month, the Peek e-mail reader keeps you connected to your messages, providing Crackberry-style love at a highly discounted price. You can take your e-mail on the road and keep in touch wherever you can get service. Peek is powered by T-Mobile's cellular network, which keeps the device in touch with the servers.

But you cannot use the Peek for anything but reading e-mail. The company's blog states, "We have limited access for our devices solely to our email server in the network. While our customers pay a flat rate for unlimited data, we pay on a per-usage basis with the carrier so we are protective for now as we’re a poor start-up."

Becoming cellular

We are more than ever becoming a portable computing nation. We have our laptops, our music players, our e-mail devices, and our e-book readers. So when will the data component of this equation shake out? It's absurd to think that we'd own a half-dozen devices and pay separately for each data plan.

Somewhere, somehow, an all-you-can-eat data plan has to be derived from this equation. I should be able to pay a flat data access rate to the carrier of my choice and pull my data as needed. Family plans for multiple users would extend to using that data on more than one device at a time. But that price point has to be sane and affordable to consumers.

At the same time, why should my Dad, whose portable needs are well-satisfied with his little always-on e-mail device, be paying any more than $20/month for his capability? So while all-you-can-eat is an important option for data consumption, it shouldn't come at the price of eliminating � la carte plans. There will always be a population with limited needs that are willing to pay for convenience rather than covering the actual data transfer costs.

At some point, the carriers are going to need to figure out these details. Ubiquitous data access lies on the brink of exploding into the mainstream. It would be nice to think that carriers will solve the problem by balancing how much strain usage actually places on the system and how much is being charged to the customer. Right now, the prices of cellular data place them into the luxury arena for anything more than a single device. Are the carriers ready for the consumer data revolution?