Andrew John makes the most of his wireless freedom. On a slow day, he grabs a laptop and strolls out to his comfy hammock, near an oak tree in his front yard in the small town of Neffsville, Pa. There he leans back, props up the computer, and gets lost in a movie--this time The Mothman Prophecies --that is running on another computer back in the house. The film is spooky and dark, but the sun is bright. "It's nice out in the yard--it's like going on a little vacation for me," says the 43-year-old home remodeler.

Such is the promise of the wireless home--the ability to do what we want where we want. But it wasn't easy for John to earn his little bit of independence. He had to tinker with multiple pieces of Wi-Fi wireless gear, figure out the software that makes the movie play, plus thank his fortune that--as a bachelor--he won't have any kids jamming his network with music downloads. John says the effort was worth the trouble, but even he concedes, wireless "just isn't ready for most people."

All it takes is one glance at the spaghetti of cords behind a desk or TV stand to grasp the appeal of wireless technology. Cellphones have shown us you can cut the cord, and now we want all of our devices to meet that standard of flexibility. So electronics makers are fast developing gadgets intended to match our needs as we further blur the line between devices used for work and those for entertainment. The same laptop that comes with built-in Wi-Fi for checking your E-mail at the airport also comes souped up with speakers and screens made for that CSI rerun stored on the hard drive. The eventual goal is to make all of your digital media--music, photos, and ultimately video--available everywhere in your house without any wires necessary. "Wireless video--that's really the holy grail," says Sean Wargo, an analyst at the Consumer Electronics Association.

No-wire home. Optimists say these goals can be reached in about five years--that we can have a home that needs no wires to pump all of our favorite films, even that high-definition Olympics coverage, to multiple rooms upstairs and down. "It's what consumers want, so engineers will solve the problems," says Franz Fink, an executive at Freescale Semiconductor Inc., a Texas company that's making a new type of wireless chip.

Yet the actual experience of today's wireless frontier fosters pessimism. Fully two thirds of the people who have tried to set up a simple link between a PC and a broadband modem have had to get help, either from friends or tech support, though it took less than four hours for most, says a survey done by Wargo's CEA. Wireless is hardly plug-'n-play, and it's technology that's been around more than five years already--a lifetime in the electronics world. Once installed, wireless devices casually broadcast household secrets around the neighborhood, choke on demands for faster speeds, and trip up frequently on interference from other household gadgets such as microwave ovens. Developing new wireless technologies, such as improvements to today's Wi-Fi standards and wholly new ones like Ultra-Wideband, could alleviate these problems. But for most households, old-fashioned wires--sometimes professionally installed--remain the more attractive option for sending data around the house, at least for the near future and maybe forever.

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