The road to success for any technology is never smooth-there are lots of bumps. Building any high-technology industry is no exception. But have we reached a peak? Is it all downhill from here?

First, said my friend, look at stock prices. All of the industry leaders-Ericsson, Motorola, AT&T Wireless, Sprint PCS-are way off their highs. A big part of the problem is vendor financing of carrier purchases, and the carriers are in trouble because of high expenses, stiff competition and no new services (like higher-speed data) to grow with at present.

That led us to a discussion of exaggerated expectations-3G and mobile e-commerce are going to take much longer to have a material impact on both users and the economy than most analysts had forecast. Paradigms usually shift slowly. Irwin Jacobs' recent admission that 3G revenues won't materialize for some time creamed Qualcomm's stock price.

Finally, there's the issue of the overall economy. Things are, to say the least, not good. Some wireless startups are biting the dust, and resumes are being updated daily.

Nevertheless, the death of wireless isn't even a remote possibility. I have no doubt that, as engineers, we will continue to bend the universe to our will. The range of mobile communications and computing products continues to expand, and there's no shortage of innovation.

And my friend missed a key point altogether: that the success of wireless is assured because there is no substitute. Want to communicate while mobile? Well, you're going to use a radio, and coming innovations will continue to improve that radio significantly.

Wireless isn't in a dot-com slump. What we have is a temporary problem, and the two key factors behind it-the economy and overly exuberant marketing-are both self-correcting.

Economic slumps are complex and difficult to analyze, but they don't last forever. At some point we get tired of them, start spending money again and the good times return. In the case of wireless, my friend missed the most important element of all-when it comes to mobile communications, we're still in the early days. I won't be surprised if we end up leading the rest of the economy back to health.

Craig J. Mathias is an analyst with the Farpoint Group (Ashland, Mass.).