Interest in short-range unlicensed wireless technology appears to be growing off the back of concerns about the delays and cost of the long-range wireless technology of GPRS and 3G, deepen. At the moment 802.11b appears to be the wireless flavour that most vendors prefer.

There are solid reasons for this choice. The technology has been seasoned over five years in the commercial marketplace, can deliver a healthy 2mbps (although promising 11Mbps) and the silicon is now cheap enough to be integrated into notebooks as an attractive value-add.

There is also now a market for its use. Short range unlicensed wireless works on the premise that you shouldn't need a long range, expensive 'Martini-style' service that can connect you 'anytime any place anywhere' for effective mobile computing. All you need is your relevant unlicensed short range base-station hooked up to a wired pipe and a log-on for the network. The user can then access whatever they want from the internet, with their own notebook and without the headache of having asking permission to 'borrow' a phone socket and contribute to the house phone bill.

In the US 802.11b style LAN services have become increasingly common in hotels and airports. Last month Starbucks, the MacDonalds of the coffee franchise, announced they would be adding 802.11b services to their outlets. Bearing in mind the ubiquity of Starbucks outlets and the crippling incompatibility between the patchwork of mobile standards across the US, this is an opportunity no business with a widely roaming mobile sales-force should really ignore. No matter where sales are visiting, you can almost guarantee a Starbucks will be nearby. All a user of an 802.11b-enabled notebook need do is walk in, buy a coffee, boot their notebook and log-in to the Starbucks LAN, and they are then able to reach whatever applications their company has transcoded for browser access.

Of course, the service is more suited to the US and its culture of free local call rates than it is to the UK, but this could all change with the increasing availability of ADSL. ADSL offers an always-on, all-you-can-eat service for a flat monthly fee. ADSL is fast, and is becoming common enough in London to be heard being discussed in pubs. Setting up an 802.11b wireless LAN is far, far less complex and expensive as setting up a standard ethernet LAN. All it involves is purchasing a base-station, a cheap hub and an ADSL connection. Correctly configured, the base-station can provide multiple and dynamic connections to 802.11b enabled devices across shared ADSL bandwidth.

There are few areas of the UK where there are enough wirelessly-enabled road-warriors passing through to reassure a café owner that the extra £50 a month ADSL adds to his running costs will deliver significant return on investment - and even if there were wireless enabled devices are very far from reaching critical mass.

Would it be worth the while of a company with heavy GSM expenses and many customers local to the café helping meet the cost by sponsoring, providing and configuring the kit?