Currently there are three wireless-networking standards competing for your airtime. Wi-Fi (802.11b) is the corporate choice and has a suitably wide range for use in big office spaces. 802.11a offers bigger bandwidth and fewer interference problems but a shorter range. Bluetooth is meant for short-range, temporary networking in conference rooms, schools or homes.

Wi-Fi is currently the most popular and least expensive wireless LAN specification. Its balance of economy, bandwidth, and particularly range have made it the dominant standard for business, and many employees have taken the technology home with them for work and family computing. But Wi-Fi has a couple of drawbacks. It shares airspace with cellphones, Bluetooth, security radios and other devices, so it's vulnerable to interference. And because of data-transfer overhead and the inevitable wall or other transmission obstacle, its real throughput is closer to 5Mbps, or about half of its specification.

802.11a has a couple of advantages over Wi-Fi. It runs at a less-populated frequency (5.15GHz to 5.35GHz) and is therefore less prone to interference. Its bandwidth is much higher, at a theoretical peak of 54Mbps. Even though actual throughput is closer to 22Mbps, it still offers a lot more elbow-room than Wi-Fi does for transferring high-quality digital audio and video or other large files across the network, as well as for sharing a broadband connection.

Because Wi-Fi and 802.11a use different radio technologies and portions of the spectrum, they are incompatible with one another. However, dual-standard equipment is currently available, which makes switching back and forth surprisingly simple. Still, if you want to make a choice between the two and stick to it, consider these factors: if you already use one or the other standard at your business, you should probably use the same one at home to make telecommuting easier. If compatibility and price are not issues, 802.11a's better performance could be worth the extra expense. But if you need to cover a lot of ground cheaply, Wi-Fi is the more efficient choice.

Bluetooth is a somewhat different standard from Wi-Fi or 802.11a, offering much more flexibility but on a smaller, 'personal area network' scale. Its actual throughput is only 300Kbps, and its range around 10m. But unlike Wi-Fi and 802.11a, which require adapters, routers, gateways, access points and synchronised setup schemes to connect devices, any devices with a Bluetooth radio and antennae can speak to each other with little or no preparation. Bluetooth is also poised to replace infrared ports as the instant-transfer mode of choice, with better range and no line-of-sight requirement. Meeting attendees can immediately transfer files between their Bluetooth-equipped notebooks across a conference table, or they can send a file to a Bluetooth-equipped printer without downloading drivers. Bluetooth-equipped kiosks in airports and coffee houses let you log on to the Internet through your laptop or handheld. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi occupy the same frequency range, because of this they can eat into each other's bandwidth and reduce throughput by 10 percent or more.

THE BENEFITS OF WIRELESS LAN TECHNOLOGY

• Convenience - The wireless nature of such networks allows users to access network resources from nearly any convenient location within their primary networking environment (home or office). With the increasing saturation of laptop-style computers, this is particularly relevant.
• Mobility - With the emergence of public wireless networks, users can access the internet even outside their normal work environment. Most chain coffee shops, for example, offer their customers a wireless connection to the internet at little or no cost.
• Productivity - Users connected to a wireless network can maintain a nearly constant affiliation with their desired network as they move from place to place. For a business, this implies that an employee can potentially be more productive as his or her work can be accomplished from any convenient location.
• Deployment - Initial setup of an infrastructure-based wireless network requires little more than a single access point. Wired networks, on the other hand, have the additional cost and complexity of actual physical cables being run to numerous locations (which can even be impossible for hard-to-reach locations within a building).
• Expandability - Wireless networks can serve a suddenly-increased number of clients with the existing equipment. In a wired network, additional clients would require additional wiring.
• Cost - Wireless networking hardware is at worst a modest increase from wired counterparts. This potentially increased cost is almost always more than outweighed by the savings in cost and labor associated to running physical cables. Wi-Fi chipset pricing continues to come down, making Wi-Fi a very economical networking option and driving inclusion of Wi-Fi in an ever-widening array of devices.

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