The rocky road to high-speed wireless - Despite its promise, 3G technology still has a ways to go before adoption.(Company Business and Marketing)

DESPITE ITS EVER-INCREASING popularity, wireless data transmission technology is not making great inroads into the enterprise for one big reason: Applications most attractive to the largest of enterprises -- those mission-critical solutions that sit on a corporate network behind the firewall -- end up using too much bandwidth to make wireless technologies a practical consideration.

Nevertheless, most companies readily understand the benefit of getting executives and field-force operations linked via wireless access to enterprise applications such as those from Siebel and SAP.

"With high speed data access, workers could become wireless members of the LAN family; that's a good way to put it," said Clarke Sykes, vice president of IT at the Merchants Insurance Group in Buffalo, N.Y.

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