With 3G deployments moving at a snails pace - roaming mobile phones, capable of operating on Wi-Fi and any other network available, are the bridge to compelling wireless features that don't suck. Wireless phone manufacturers in the U.S. are trying, they really are. It's simply that the networks being used aren't capable of offering us anything more compelling than fairly banal services.

Verizon is the only company currently offering true third generation mobile connectivity, and that's only available for $80 a month in two cities, with no indication of expansion. The rest of U.S. carriers have been engaged in a semantic battle over whether or not their 2.5G-speed CDMA 2000 1X and competing networks can even be considered "third generation". They'd really like you to think so.

Japan is well on their way of becoming the futuristic society depicted in Blade-Runner, while we're still waiting for our friend down the street to receive a twenty character SMS message we sent fifteen minutes ago. We've got cameras on our phones, but god forbid we'd want to actually send more than a single image to another mobile user without taking a nap.

It isn't just speed we're waiting for. Wireless users in the US have shelled out some $629 million in fees for number portability since January of 2002, says the Center for Public Integrity, and we're still waiting. What's worse, the FCC doesn't hold wireless carriers accountable for accuracy in determining these fees - so we've probably paid for a service we've yet to get - several times over.

Compelling applications are waiting for next generation network deployments. In the interim, companies like Sprint are trying to distract customers by offering services like television at a frame-per-second over your mobile phone. While the Japanese are perusing quality video streams of potential mates delivered by match-making services, we're paying ten dollars a month (plus fees) to watch a stuttering version of Trading Spaces.

To bypass the 3G roadblock, a great many vendors have been developing chipsets capable of roaming from network to network, operating over GSM or CDMA networks when necessary, but then also capable of tapping into high-speed Wi-Fi networks. Enough bandwidth to stream music, photos or presentations from a home server. Enough bandwidth to provide fairly decent video. Enough bandwidth to actually make mobile communications more interesting than painful.

Late last month at the CTIA show in Las Vegas, a company dubbed TTPCom unveiled their CDMA/802.11 chipset, which delivers a dual baseband solution on a single piece of silicon. Their "GSM.11" silicon architecture should see the market sometime in 2005, in phones that should cost less than $100.

Of course TTPCom isn't alone in positioning themselves for a new generation of hybrid phones; a handful of other more mainstream chipset manufacturers (like Nokia) are also busy tinkering in the lab. Qualcomm has been promising hybrid Wi-Fi capable phones since 2002. Mitel Networks has been pushing hard to incorporate VoIP over Wi-Fi via cell, though mobile networks need some serious upgrades if users want to keep one phone number across services.

If you're impatient for Wi-Fi VoIP over your cell, you could purchase the Treo 600 (see review from PC Magazine) from Palm One, plug a Wi-Fi access card into the SDIO slot, and have the best of both worlds at your finger-tips. The only catch is you'll need to wait for the Palm OS 5.x drivers, which should be available before the end of the year. Then it's simply a matter of waiting for someone to develop a decent Palm VoIP application, and for smart network upgrades allowing you to maintain one number across services.

Easy, right?