While it hardly comes as much of a surprise, Ericsson Chief Marketing Officer Johan Bergendahl is now predicting nothing short of the demise of WiFi hotspots, and he's saying that they'll be replaced by -- you guessed it -- mobile broadband. Speaking at a conference in Stockholm, Bergendahl said that "hot spots at places like Starbucks are becoming the telephone boxes of the broadband era," and that "in a few years, [HSPA] will be as common as Wi-Fi is today." Leading to that widespread use, he says, is ever-decreasing prices for mobile broadband subscriptions, and the fact that HSPA is being built into more and more laptops. Of course there are som who think differently about the fate of WiFi. Meraki, for example, is planning to deploy a WLAN network covering San Francisco with 15.000 antennas. So the fight is on, and those who will surely win are users hungry for cheap mobile Internet.