The boxing analogy in this story gets old really quickly but the piece notes that Wi-Fi was a hot topic at the annual GSM conference in Cannes, France, last week: The battle between 3G and Wi-Fi has been portrayed slightly wrong in many articles, though. It's not a direct battle between 3G and Wi-Fi--the offerings are just too different to imagine that they can compete head to head. The real battle will be between the cellular operators who have aggressively pursed Wi-Fi and those that haven't.
They are all pursuing some sort of higher data rate upgrades on their cell networks and they must. Wi-Fi makes a great alternative to those networks where it's available but the cellular networks are equally great where no Wi-Fi is available, even though they're slow. Wi-Fi will cannibalize cellular data networks--but only for cellular operators who don't own Wi-Fi networks. The cell operators would be smart to build their own Wi-Fi networks so they can earn revenues from their customers who prefer to use Wi-Fi where it's available.