The 802.11 market is stalling.

I know because Broadcom has warned that its sales are flat.

Broadcom absolutely rocks in the Wi-Fi chip market. It is constantly ahead of the curve. It has great relationships with OEMs and product marketers. TI and Intel look good, but no one plays the inside game as well as Broadcom, trust me.

And if Broadcom is catching a cold, then everyone else has pneumonia.

Why is this?

Despite the low cost of Wi-Fi, the product category is having a tough time reaching beyond its base, beyond the gadget freaks and early adopters who love it.

There remain security concerns. The technology is not stable -- not with a new N version coming.

It's just not a mass market thing yet.

Business may hang its fears on security, while consumers may hang it on network reach and ease-of-use, but I think there are two other things at work here.

Those problems are backhaul and applications. An 802.11g line is not going to run at 54 Mbps with a 768 Kbps backhaul. It's just not. In some places Wi-Fi is just waiting for Wi-Max. In other places it's waiting on fiber.

But applications remain the bigger hurdle. I've said this before and I'll say it again, this is not going to explode with the same-old applications. Surfing and e-mail are old stuff.

We badly need Always On solutions that take data from our daily lives and help us make sense of it. We need medical applications, inventory applications, remote control applications, security applications. We need to treat Wi-Fi as a platform, not as an end solution.

Only when we do that will it take off. And right now our fear prevents us from doing that.

We fear what will be done with the data. We fear what might happen to the data along the path from our heart to the PC's head. We fear what the government might do, what business might do. We fear Big Brother and Little Brother.

The answer, again, is the simple principle that data you create belongs to you. Period. Until the legal, and political, logjams are broken this dam won't burst.

And companies like Broadcom will remain in neutral.