The problem for me is securing the cash, either from my fiscally conservative wife or from my budget-limited boss, to pay for the gadgets I want to buy. The problem for the industry is broader: Will the capital markets fund the infrastructures needed to support the various "end-user terminals," as these systems are sometimes called?

It will take a healthy capital market, for example, to supply funds to the 1,490 television stations that must upgrade their cameras and transmission equipment for digital TV. Digital radio is underfunded as well. The two satellites (nicknamed Rock and Roll) are up, and music-hip towns like Austin have the transmitters for XM radio in place. But marketing a new service like digital radio requires billions, and today's bond and stock markets are risk-averse.

Dan Artusi, chief operating officer at Silicon Laboratories and the former head of Motorola's networking-semiconductor business, has an interesting outlook on how WiFi wireless networks and 3G cellular networks might compete for customers and infrastructure dollars.

Here in Austin, the 10 Schlotzsky's restaurants have installed WiFi networks. In the case of the downtown store, the network functions not only in the restaurant itself but down the whole block of Congress Avenue that the restaurant faces.

Many such hot spots of wireless connectivity are popping up worldwide (see www.freenetworks.org).

That trend has Artusi raising this question: Rather than pay a buck-fifty a minute for a 3G wireless service, how many people will simply wander down the street into a free or almost-free wireless network from which to send and retrieve e-mails, MP3 files, photos and other useful bits of information?

It's a sticky scenario, particularly since many cellular service providers have spent so much on spectrum auctions-lining their governments' pockets-that they have little left for 3G wireless infrastructure.

Most of us can scrape together the cash for the end-user terminal our heart most desires. Whether the capital markets will fund the supporting infrastructure is another matter.

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