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When Humane Wildlife Control Inc. decided to convert its Hamilton head office into a wireless environment earlier this year it ran dead into the yin and yang realities of today's technology. For every good reason to go wireless, there was a solid argument to stay with the status quo.

While a wireless office would allow the 10 people working out of the company's two-storey building to work anywhere, even at the picnic table in the back yard, the speed with which they could access the applications the company uses would be about a twentieth of that provided by the existing wired system.

And while going wireless would mean an end to the expensive process of running wires to a new workstation every time the company added staff, it would also mean trashing the eight two-year-old Dell desktop PCs office staff uses today and replacing them with more expensive new laptops.

"It was a great idea in principle but it just didn't work out in reality," says Jason Matthews, the company's customer service manager. "The freedom a wireless system would have given us had to be balanced off against speed and cost."

Undaunted, Humane Wildlife did what it considers the next best thing. It created a hybrid system. It left its existing wired network as is and for less than $5,000 added on a wireless network.

Hybrid solutions -- various permutations of wired and wireless -- are a growing trend among small businesses, says Matt Morrison, director of the business Internet, small and medium business group at Bell Canada in Toronto.

"Our surveys of small business show that 30 per cent of staff do not work at their desks all the time," he says.

"Small businesses, especially, want the ability to use laptops anywhere on their premises. They also want to let mobile staff -- people on the road all the time -- to be able to use their laptops and tablets when they come into the office without having to provide them a wired connection to the network."

At the same time, ever dollar conscious, small businesses are reluctant to abandon their investment in perfectly serviceable desktop PCs and wired networks and peripherals such as printers and fax machines.

"Frankly, we have never done a completely wireless small business installation and yet small businesses are our market," says Stuart Crawford, vice-president of business development at Calgary-based IT Matters Inc., a computer and networking services provider for small- and medium-sized businesses.

"What we see instead are lots and lots of hybrid solutions," he says.

"It is almost always a blend of wired and wireless," adds Barry Dowd, president of Integrated Business Intelligence Corp. of Hamilton. His company installed Humane Wildlife's wireless system

"Concerns about investment in existing equipment are major factors but speed is, as well," he adds. "If you are using any kind of application involving digitally rich material, wireless can't handle it. The best you can do is 54 MB a second versus 20 times that speed with a T1 Internet connection." A T1 carrier is a dedicated phone connection supporting data rates of 1,544 megabytes a second.

Improvements in speed are coming, says Dave Robinson, vice-president of business implementation at Rogers Communications Inc. in Toronto.

"The good news is the 802.11n standard has now been accepted and we should see new hardware coming to market within a year or so that will double the speed of wireless downloads," he says.

The 802.11n is an emerging faster standard for high-speed Wi-Fi networking than the existing 802.11 version.

Still, that speed will be just one-tenth of a wired network connected to a high-speed cable provided by Bell, Telus or Rogers.

Offsetting speed is the ease and low cost of creating a wireless environment. For the smallest office, such as a home office, all that may be needed is an inexpensive wireless modem, available for as little as $200, Mr. Dowd says.

A basic modem can be good for up to eight computers and provide coverage throughout a two-storey home.

The downside is that it offers little protection against intrusion.

To add a firewall, upgrade to a simple router connected to the modem, he says. They can be purchased for $500 and up. A basic router can handle 8 to 16 computers, he says.

For those with an existing wired network connected through a server, the router can be connected directly to the server. If the area to be covered proves too large for a single router, others can be added or the system can be extended with repeaters, Mr. Dowd says.

Humane Wildlife connected a pair of routers to the server that carries all its business applications; one provides coverage for the front of its two-storey building while the other does the same for the rear and the backyard with its picnic table.

"On nice days, that's where I go to work," Mr. Matthews says.

Current technology also allows small businesses to extend wireless capability to a range of peripherals such as printers, scanners, copiers and fax machines.

"There are a wide variety of solutions now available," says Jean-Paul Desmarais, business customer marketing manager at Hewlett-Packard (Canada) Co. of Mississauga, Ont. "It all depends on your office configuration."

All-in-one devices can combine a printer, copier, fax and scanner and be small enough to sit on a desk, he says. Anyone thinking of adding wireless peripherals should remember to order them with an 802.11 card or insert it themselves later.

For wireless offices, however, the next big thing may be wireless "softphones." Companies such as Vonage Canada Inc. of Mississauga are offering kits that turn wireless laptops into telephones through Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology.

The newest wireless option, says Bruce Robertson, Vonage product marketing manager is the V-phone. It is a small USB memory stick that comes with a headset and can be carried in a shirt pocket. Plug the V-phone into any computer with wireless, or wired high-speed, Internet access and presto, the computer becomes a telephone.