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So much Internet, so many wireless ways to get it: A battle is intensifying over which methods will dominate, and the outcome could determine how people surf the Web for years to come.

One method for cable-free navigation - connecting through a cellular phone network - got a boost two weeks ago when a group of companies and the GSM Association, an industry lobby, promised to spend $1 billion to market a new initiative to make laptop computers wireless-ready without using Wi-Fi technology.

A day earlier, a competing technology called WiMax - which uses its own tower-based infrastructure to offer broadband wireless Internet connections - received its own vote of confidence when, after billions of dollars in investment, Sprint Nextel began offering the service in Baltimore, the first large WiMax roll-out in the United States.

For now, the two methods are co-existing. But just as Sony's Blu-ray stamped out Toshiba's HD DVD format in digital video, and VHS defeated Beta in videocassettes, in a few years only one standard may be left standing.

"There will inevitably be competition and coexistence between cellular and WiMax operators for mobile broadband," said Berge Ayvazian, chief strategy officer at the Yankee Group, a technology consulting firm based in Boston.