By Ray Anderson

As mobile Web use surges ahead in the United States, it's interesting to think about where this trend will lead and if -- somewhere down the road -- mobile surfing might eventually start to replace traditional Internet usage on a PC.

Growth predictions for mobile Web use are hard to pin down, but Bango has seen an 11 percent increase in mobile Web surfing globally over the last 12 months and a 15 percent increase in the U.S. alone over the same time period.

The two biggest factors behind growth in the U.S. are the rollout of a great choice of data plans by all the major mobile carriers and the iPhone effect.

U.S. carriers now offer a variety of affordable all-you-can-eat data plans which encourage people to browse the Internet on their phone.

Add to this the iPhone effect where people see how cool it is to surf the Web from their phone and you begin to understand why an increasing number of people are interested in exploring the world of mobile browsing on their Internet-enabled phone.

More data-friendly devices featuring higher resolution screens and faster 3G networks are all contributing to this mobile Web browsing surge.

Will it affect traditional internet usage?

Again, hard to tell but there are telltale signs.

Look, for instance, at broadcasters such as NBC and Britain's BBC which covered the Beijing Olympic Games this summer. The networks saw an increase in online use, but the significant growth was to their mobile sites.

NBC's Olympics mobile site generated close to 30 million page views, with users spending around 6 minutes browsing the news.

In countries where Internet access is not easily available because of poor landline infrastructure, mobile Web surfing is increasing rapidly as people find they can access the Internet on their phones.

The top five countries accessing the mobile Web via Bango in July were Britain at 19.35 percent, the U.S. at 18.88 percent, India at 10.82 percent, South Africa at 8.82 percent and Indonesia at 4.08 percent.

It's also interesting to note that surfers have the same interests across geographies.

Around the globe, mobile surfing primarily is driven by entertainment -- sports, music, games and some phone personalization.

In more advanced Asian markets such as South Korea and Japan, we see more multiplayer mobile games and social networking -- these are big drivers for mobile usage -- than we have noted in Europe and North America.

The idea of two "Webs" is beginning to blur.

As far as consumers are concerned, the mobile Web is the PC Web -- just smaller. When people are looking for services and content that match the immediacy and personal nature of mobile, they feel they are browsing the regular Internet but on a mobile phone.

If we believe the recent stat that 91 percent of mobile users are never more than 3 feet away from their mobile phone, then it seems inevitable that mobile surfing will take over from the PC.

Ray Anderson is Cambridge, England-based CEO of Bango, a mobile Internet services provider. Reach him at .