This issue is inducing severe heartburn (sorry) in the wireless space. Cellular carriers are figuring out that they alone have the breadth, knowledge and infrastructure needed to peddle public Wi-Fi access. The sticking point: How do you embrace the opportunity without pushing out or even undermining your investment in 3G?

And so the pizza analogy was delivered (that's enough now). Wi-Fi and 3G go together, just like pizza and pepperoni. Every bite has cheese. But every once in a while you lay your teeth into a pepperoni and, um, your e-mail downloads much faster.

It's actually not a bad graphical representation, this. Just don't look too deep at the dish (I said stop it!).

When I last checked, WiFinder had identified 3,486 public hotspots in the United States. The number's growing, so let's be generous and call it 5,000. Let's continue our beneficence, and assume all 5,000 hotspots deliver a range of 300 feet. Taken together, that's about 50 square miles of hotspot coverage in the United States-barely twice the size of Manhattan Island.

So, if we were to represent existing Wi-Fi coverage with pizza drawn to scale, we'd need a pie with a radius of nearly two football fields-and it would have just one measly slice of pepperoni on top.

I'm making light. But when you think about it, doesn't this anatomically correct pepperoni pizza do more to support the point? How could Wi-Fi possibly supplant third-generation wireless networks?

All the Borders that T-Mobile outfits, all the McDonalds that Cometa enables, all the coffee shops that Toshiba sets up and all the pepperoni pieces out there that Intel blesses as interoperable with Centrino (and you wondered why the brand name sounded Italian?) can't change that.

With enough coverage, though, these efforts will help build demand for mobile data access-and that bodes well for 3G. Because while 3G can't match Wi-Fi bandwidth, Wi-Fi will never match 3G's breadth of coverage.

Now that's something you can really sink your teeth into.

Mike Feibus, Principal Analyst at Techknowledge Strategies Inc. (Scottsdale, Ariz.), is producing a report on the market for Wireless LAN Chip Sets. see www.techknowledge-group.com to learn more.