Is there now a fourth utility? We all take water, gas and electricity for granted, but Wi-fi internet access is moving from becoming something to get excited about to something merely essential for everyday life.
Is there anything more frustrating than having the internet at your fingertips, but on a smartphone that's struggling to load pages?
The smartphone has taken Wi-fi from being a tech used by laptops to something used by everyone, everywhere, but it's what comes next that could make "one of the greatest success stories of the last century" into a 21st-century icon. If it's not already.
That hyperbole comes from the Wi-Fi Alliance, which created the wireless technology back in 1999. Wi-fi's 15th birthday seems like a good time to reappraise it, because the birth of fitness gadgets, the evolution of the smart home and the global spread of hot spots is making it an endemic public utility demanded by us all.
Wi-fi now uses 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz frequency radio waves, but it's changed a lot in those 15 years. When it began, it offered just 11 megabits per seconds; now it can reach a gigabyte per second. That 1,000 times increase has been accompanied by an explosion in the number of gadgets it's used in.
As well as 4,000 smartphones and tablets, over 1,100 printers, 6,000 routers and 3,500 smart TVs have been Wi-fi certified in the last 15 years. Two billion Wi-fi devices were sold last year alone, a figure that will double by 2020, according to the Wi-fi Alliance. Most startling of all, Wi-fi is used in a massive 25 per cent of homes around the world.
The success of Facebook and Weibo would have been impossible without Wi-fi, and there's been a huge surge of instant messaging apps in the last few years (including WhatsApp, WeChat, KakaoTalk, LINE, Viber and SnapChat) that actively seek-out Wi-fi to dodge data costs. Without Wi-fi, a smartphone or tablet is just a hunk of plastic and glass.