Until last year, wireless networking was a joke. Based in a LAN it was pathetically slow and far too expensive, not to mention unreliable. In a wide area service scenario it was so glacially slow as to be practically unusable. Only stunted devices like PDAs could make any real use of this technology, and even then it was useful only for text transfer. Wireless Internet access was looking for a much-needed kick start.
Ethernet sans the cabling.
For one thing, walking outside the range of your access point and into another subnet was a serious no-no.