Does anyone think that paying monthly for internet will be going the way of the dinosaur?

If you have Wi-Fi in your home, you pay an additional monthly fee for it, usually through your cable provider.

But we've had smart phones since 2007, and smart tablets for several years, with their own built in 4G network, and unless you get a top of the line IPhone or Apple, they arent all that expensive anymore.

Well, why not smart laptops and maybe even smart desktops?

Is it possible that, in the not too distant future, the only ones who will be paying for internet will be those living in rural areas?

Afterall, tbe first company to come out with this will have a great selling point:

"Buy our laptops and PCs and you won't have to pay a monthly bill to use them."

If that is going to happen, it will take a very long time before it even becomes feasible in a lot of places. How would you deal with absurdly small data limits from cell carriers? You can easily burn through gigabytes of data with a few hours of using the Internet on pages like Netflix, YouTube, downloading large files, etc. Even "unlimited" plans will slow you down after x amount of gigabytes you use.

Additionally, if you start putting a lot of people on cell towers, you're going to overload them. Cell carriers are pretty cheap when it comes to their infrastructure, so I really don't think they're going to be upgrading their infrastructure any time soon. AT&T is already lying about their 5G service by changing the 4G icon on some phones to 5G.

In short, this won't happen anytime soon.

One way or another, you pay for online access.

The cost may be included in a calling plan or otherwise hidden,
but it IS figured into whatever you pay for the service you get.

And HTF do you think that smartphone connects to the Internet? You pay for the data, or connect to a free wi-fi signal being provided by someone that pays for it.