Business use of wireless technology is rapidly making always-on communications an ubiquitous facility for mobile workers. But a new battle could be looming between the mobile carriers and proponents of other wireless standards, who are hopeful that wireless hotspots and technologies such as WiMax will tempt customers to their business model.

Until recently, mobile communications presented users with a relatively simple choice: you could have data access virtually anywhere via a somewhat tardy GPRS link, or you could use Wi-Fi for greater speed, but only when you were within close proximity to an access point or hotspot.

Nowadays, Wi-Fi hotspots have become much more widespread, at least in city centres, while operators such as The Cloud and service aggregators such as iPass have made it simpler to hook up to a Wi-Fi hotspot without having to pay upfront each time you connect.

However, Wi-Fi is still nowhere near all-pervasive. This means that if your organisation requires always-on capability similar to that offered by a BlackBerry email device or if you work at remote customer sites, a wireless connection via one of the mobile phone networks is pretty much your only option.

This could change, though. In the US, one of the larger carriers has said it intends to build a WiMax network covering much of the country over the next few years. Using the 802.16e version of WiMax, Sprint Nextel aims to offer a service capable of download speeds between 2Mbit/s and 4Mbit/s. WiMax also operates over several kilometres, as opposed to a couple of hundred metres for Wi-Fi, which gives users considerable leeway to wander about without going out of range of the access point.

But don’t expect an equivalent WiMax service to be available in the UK anytime soon. The situation seems to be that many of the frequencies that might be used to operate a WiMax service are already used for other purposes, or are owned by companies lacking the clout to offer a nationwide service.

Fortunately, the mobile phone operators haven’t been standing still. 3G coverage is expanding, but still patchy, while the HSDPA extensions to 3G offer increased bandwidth. Although early 3G services tested by IT Week turned out to be little faster than using GPRS, HSDPA seems much better. Using a laptop with a built-in HSDPA connection recently, I was able to watch streamed video content, and web pages seemed to load up almost as quickly as they would using a desk-bound PC and a wired Ethernet connection.

At present, the phone networks are still the best choice if you need a mobile data connection, but some heavyweight industry names are putting a lot of effort behind technologies such as WiMax. Even Nokia, the world leader in mobile phones, has started a line of devices that use Wi-Fi instead of a mobile connection, and a forthcoming model is expected to operate on Sprint’s WiMax network in the US. The next few years look set to be very interesting for mobile wireless technology.