The businessman in the Vodafone advert is sharp-suited, square-jawed and, inevitably, handsome. He is also in an incredible hurry.

The photo shows him sprinting down the street with his laptop under one arm, moving so fast that the taxis and passing shoppers blur into the background. Everything in the image is carefully crafted to create a feeling of overwhelming speed.

It is the kind of advertising image that executives and their network administrators are going to see a lot of over the coming months. The UK's mobile operators, chief among them Vodafone, Orange and mmO2, are all gearing up to offer their corporate customers a new range of services and products, all powered by super-fast, third-generation (3G) wireless technology.

The image of the sprinting businessman comes from an online promotion for Vodafone's 3G "Mobile Connect" wireless card, designed to plug into a laptop and give broadband-like internet access to mobile workers wherever there is a 3G signal blasting through the ether.

At the head of the advertising blurb are details of the new wireless card's unique selling point – "speeds that are up to seven times faster than a 56k PSTN modem dial-up connection." Turn to competitors' websites and you will see similarly velocity-obsessed messages. T-Mobile offers the "fastest available speeds" through its 3G Connection Centre card, yours for a premium price of £199 plus £70 per month flat-rate connection fee.

The message is clear – businesses need speed and the latest 3G technology can provide it. What is less obvious, for now at least, is the size of the corporate market for all that super-fast 3G wireless. Exact subscriber numbers from European operators have been noticeably hard to come by.

In June, Vodafone did announce that it had sold 50,000 of its 3G data cards since it first launched them in six key European markets in February, hardly an earth-shattering figure from such a large customer base. More recently, Orange would only tell journalists that its new 3G card was selling in "very nice numbers" in the UK.

There may be good reasons for such reticence.

One possible obstacle facing the immediate spread of the 3G is that it is far from the only game in town when it comes to high-speed wireless. Hundreds of hotels, coffee shops and airport currently offer their

customers and passengers access to wireless "hot-spots" which often connect with higher speeds than 3G – although only over a very limited area.

Another potential problem is the relatively small number of 3G-powered products available on the market. Vodafone, T-Mobile and Orange, although they have launched 3G laptop cards, have so far held off from launching fully-fledged mobile phone services, powerful enough to carry potentially attractive corporate services like real-time video calls. Orange, which originally promised to get a 3G voice service out before

Christmas, this month warned that it may now wait until next year while it sorted out glitches on its network.

The only operator currently up and running with a 3G phone service in the UK is 3, the business controlled by Hong Kong's Hutchison Whampoa which launched way ahead of the market late last year. But that launch had problems of its own. Early 3G-powered mobile phones offered by 3 suffered from bulky design, poor battery life and patchy network coverage.

"Hutchison's premature marketing left customers disappointed and led it to sustain volume with extreme discounting," said a report by Gartner analysts Ben King and Jason Chapman. "Rushing out services before quality and customer satisfaction can be assured damages the prospects for the market."

Whether that damage turns out to be long-term remains to be seen. But Vodafone and its competitors in the nascent 3G market are unlikely to give up easily.

The industry collectively paid billions for their original 3G licenses during the last telecoms boom at the turn of the millennium. They are now committed to carrying on spending millions on advertising their 3G products to attract customers and get some return on their huge investments.

Vodafone has already given us its sprinting businessman and others are bound to follow - in time. "As an industry we have a track record of hyping technology before it is ready," said Dave McGlade, CEO of mmO2 UK. "Instead we should be launching it only when it has the right customer experience.

"3G will be a central pillar for the mobile industry moving forwards - but we won't see mass market adoption of this technology until late 2005."

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