OPINION: 3G mobile technology is a bit like getting a phone line installed: it'll be there next week, promise. By the time 3G arrives, will it be obsolete?

Astoundingly, a mobile phone company has admitted that 3G is crock. Not in so many words, of course.

It's a picture telcos and mobile phone vendors have been painting for around two years, in unrealistically bright colours--the idea that we'll be watching videos, sending e-mails, surfing the Web, listening to music, and all sorts of other bandwidth intensive (and therefore revenue-generating) things from the comfort of our mobile phone, wherever we are.

The reality has fallen well short.

The proposed evolution of mobile data services seems to have stagnated. 21/2G technologies such as GPRS were supposed to whet our appetites and open our eyes to the possibilities of mobile data. 3G would be the main course of full multimedia whiz-bang connectivity, which was supposed to have arrived this year.

But hardly anyone uses GPRS because there aren't any applications. Nobody will develop applications unless there are people who are going to use them, and nobody will use the applications unless there are applications. (Joseph Heller wrote a very good book about this kind of situation.) Of course there are niche business applications, but aside from the people who actually need it for work, GPRS is mostly an impress-your-friends technology.

You can imagine how desperate you'd have to be to impress your friends if you were going to pay AU$10 per megabyte in order to watch a video clip on your tiny mobile phone screen; it would cost you less to buy the DVD. But if telcos charged not-outrageous rates for data, how would they ever recoup their infrastructure investments?

So you can understand why, having forked out gazillions in 3G spectrum licenses, the telcos are not rushing to spend more on installing 3G equipment. The technology exists, the market doesn't.

Within the same time period, 802.11b wireless LAN has grown from a hey-wow technology to a commonplace business tool.

WLAN cards are now so ubiquitous in corporate notebooks, that several companies are offering public-access WLAN services in busy areas such as airports and watering holes (mostly those populated by wa . . . I mean bankers).

What does all this have to do with 3G?

Ericsson Australia technology strategist Mario Davoli released a white paper in June called WLAN as a Complement to GPRS and 3G Services, in which he envisions a widespread public infrastructure of wireless LAN hot spots, with 3G filling in the gaps (at a lower data rate) whenever you're not in range of a WLAN.

In other words, even mobile phone vendors are recognising that 3G is an inferior technology, offering slower data rates at a much higher cost than WLAN. If only WLAN could work over long distances, we could do away with this 3G nonsense for good.

It can, and we could.

Over the last few years, clever people with thick glasses have been tinkering with WLAN equipment, and found that by using specialised antennae, standard WLAN equipment can work over tens of kilometres. There is a growing number of community-based long-distance WLANs around Australia and the rest of the world, and they're being used for file sharing, VoIP, gaming, and sharing broadband Internet connections.

There are technical difficulties involved, particularly because WLAN operates in a license-free, and therefore crowded, part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The proliferation of long-distance WLANs could possibly overcrowd the airwaves to the point that they're unusable.

Also, the Australian Communications Authority is a bit iffy on the use of WLAN equipment to provide commercial services. (After all, this might have reduced the value of the 3G spectrum it was flogging.) It's the standard story of government interference: by choosing one technology over the other, we end up saddled with the inferior one, because the market didn't go in the direction the government predicted.

Even with these impediments, it's not too hard to see the idea of long-distance public-access WLANs serving all our wireless data needs. If only there was something useful we could do with them.

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