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WiFi in Your Rental Car
Jezebel writes "Avis is bundling a 3G-to-802.11 bridge with their rental cars that will turn the vehicles into WiFi hotspots. Will we now have to worry about laptop use on the Interstate?" From the article "Autonet Mobile CEO Sterling Pratz told the International Herald Tribune that the In-Car Router will function in around 95 percent of the country, including all major US cities. Pratz claims to have minimized the problem of dropped signals with a technology similar to that used by the space shuttles to maintain an Internet connection."
In soviet Russia, wireless hotspots wardrive you!
Well, many states have taken to banning cell phone use in cars by drivers, or at the very least cell phone use that isn't "hands-free." It's possible they could do the same thing with computers/internet use. Though considering how long it took for those laws to catch up to the reality of cell phone use on the road (assuming you believe they even have caught up yet), I have to wonder how many accidents will happen before such laws manage to get on the books.
Fantastic! I can wardrive from the comfort of my living room. Just let the hotspots come to me.
Question: if my car goes 70 miles/hour and my wifi goes 11Mbs, will the overall packet speed be bigger? :D
you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
This would be an interesting way to solve the problem of municiple wifi. If even 5% of the cars in a city were functioning as short range wifi routers, and if they were using tech similar to cell phones how they hand off seamlessly from tower to tower, that would be a really elegant way to network entire cities. No need to plant towers like dandellions, no problems with dead zones due to buildings, etc. I'm not thinking of people browsing web while in their car, but imagine being able to use voice or video chat (think iChat) while driving down the freeway, your car reading you a new email as you sit at a stoplight, or being able to take your laptop to the park and know there are a dozen hotspots within 300 feet of whatever park you pick. I hope this takes off.
Tho the way things are going, some paraoid person is going to flip out because it will make it easier for people to get untraceable internet access and lord knows we can't allow that, and will ruin it for everyone.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
on long road trips your passengers could chat with friends, look up roads on google.maps, or even check the weather.
if you are driving with multipule vehicles, you could have a lan party or play UT.
just think of the possibilities!!
Will we now have to worry about laptop use on the Interstate?
Yes, because the first application I think of when I think of riding in the car is a surfing the web on a laptop. This is a step further in a persistent connection to caches of information on the road. We're pretty much limited by GPS, commercial radio, cellular and CB communications. Let's get out of thinking that a computer is something you sit at and type. Multiple devices can take advantage of a persistent connection on the road. A networked car computer will either enhance or replace already existing information channels (like the ones I previously mentioned). And supply a few more; think of automated driving and distancing through wireless arrays. Traffic systems that can 'predict' with greater accuracy when cars need the lights changed or the railroad crossing sign lifted. Anyway, Yeah, people will use it to download iTunes (is that a bad thing), but let's get beyond the old man sitting at the terminal inputing text at a keyboard. That is SO twentieth century.
http://cincyboys.blogspot.com/ Everything Cincinnati. Including the word 'Finnih'
This would be an interesting way to solve the problem of municiple wifi. If even 5% of the cars in a city were functioning as short range wifi routers,
;)
I just couldn't help it, because in this case, it almost makes sense:
In Soviet Russia, car wardrives YOU!
Now do we have to worry about those pesky homeowners logging in illicitly on our mobile connection?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Bite my shiny metal ass.
Depends if you are coming or going. Doppler effect, and all.
rewriting history since 2109
There are several things here to consider.
Firstly Wifi != Laptop, this could enable things like Google Earth sat images to be downloaded in real time to your Sat/Nav system, it could be used to switch your mobile to VOIP rather than using a cell, it could be used by the cars Radio/CD/iPod player to offer you new tracks.
Secondly the person driving doesn't have to be the person working. Last year myself and a friend drove from San Francisco to Las Vegas, with a bunch of work to do we split the driving and use a car-charger adapter for the laptop, we got a good 10 hours of work done and an internet connection would have made that a lot better.
Thirdly this also means that Avis can start flogging you added extras that work on Wifi, which is cheaper than 3G connected devices.
My big question though is do all those cars have different SSIDs and will they be WPA and greater protected? If I'm connecting up to a network then I'd prefer people not being able to hijack my devices, some SatNavs can already be bluejacked and this could make it miles worse.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
"Pratz claims to have minimized the problem of dropped signals with a technology similar to that used by the space shuttles to maintain an Internet connection."
The Space shuttle is connected to the Internets?!?
nmap -A -T4 atlantis.sts.critical.nasa.gov
-jX
Don't you just love politics? It's like a comedy of errors.
It's nice someone is finally exploiting this concept commercially for travelers, but mobile 3G routers have been around for a while.
Remember Tor Amundson's DYI Linux StompBox*?
Or commercial boxes like the Junxion Box, which showed up in this solar-powered hotspot?
Now there are several little routers that will take these cards, and with EV-DO rev A, speeds are starting to compete with older-generation DSL lines.
*instead of using the URL in that article, use this one.
Everquest on the go!
Now nerds world over can actually leave their house while waiting for 12 hours spawns to pop.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
LAN PARTY BUS!! or a internetcafemobile!!
"We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the
Internet, we know that is not true."
- Robert Wilensky
Only if you're driving a VW Bug.
Now that's actually interesting to think about. We all know about time as you approach the speed of light. For the traveller, time stays the same. But for the observer, it looks like the traveller's clock has slowed down.
If you're on the spaceship, and you're hitting a morse code key at 1 hz a second, or you're transmitting WiFi at 2.1 Ghz frequency, that's like a clock. You wouldn't get an increased data rate at all. The person you're transmitting to, the observer, sees your clocks slow down. Thus, he sees your signalling rate slow down. Thus, the frequency received by the observers transmitter won't match in frequency, and he won't receive your signal without special equipment. In any case, the signalling rate will be slower, and thus the bit rate will be slower.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
I am no fan of this at all. We already have too many distractions for drivers making the roads increasingly unsafe. And each year there are more and more cars on the road. Cell phones ( and Blackberries), eating, and having the radio playing at the same time make driving very hazardous (for the driver and the other hapless drivers out there.) I don't really care if you can multitask because your focus should be on driving when you're behind the wheel. I don't want my life bet on your multitasking ability. The last thing a driver needs to be doing is surfing the web. If there could be a safety mechanism that will not allow useage while the vehicle is on the road, that is one thing. Toyota does this with some of its GPS units. You cannot manipulate them while the vehicle is moving.
I am going to be following these cars around and pacing them. Those poor rental families are going to think the last person to rent the car was a criminal and a spy or something. I can just see it now, car with 5 shadow cars all with people furiously tapping and napping on laptops in the passenger seat.
Tang
Right, and now that every kid with a DS Lite has WiFi in his handheld game system, the kids could be playing Animal Crossing online.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Now? Over a decade ago, I saw a computer parts catalog selling a laptop mount for the car - that attached to the steering wheel. It scared the hell out of me because I can easily see people on the DC Beltway using it during their commute. It wasn't just a distraction, it was a hindrance to the already poor driving ability of most people on the road.
End of line..
I went to Las Vegas over Christmas because nothing says Christmas like Vegas... As partof ourpackage deal we had a car rental from Avis. After arrivig, we took the 10 min bus ride to their area and were directed to one of 10 or so kiosks for service.
While this works for the most part with airlines, it blows for people flying in at 11pm. There two real people on duty with a line of about 50. The kiosks wouldn't pull up anyone's info and directed you to go to the counter instead.
After waiting in line for over an hour, I was told that the kiosks are down. Awesome, direct me there when you know full well they don't work.
So, if they can't keep their kiosks running, I can't only imagine what their 3Gwifi will be like.
Look up The Uranus Experiment. First zero gravity cum shot, I believe.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Yes, the observer would have to know ahead of time not only the Frequency being transmitted, but the speed at which the traveller is moving.
On top of that the traveller would have to maintain a constant speed.
If you must!
Semi off topic but I have been thinking about this lately. Why aren't all cars equipped with wifi? Traffic on highways is normally dense enough to give you a adhoc connection to any other car in the state. I dunno what you would do with that connection but it would be really cool. Some simple ideas it could provide ways to inform other drivers in your local network of accidents and delays. I am sure other people could come up with more interesting uses of such a network.
Dooom
The killer app for this will be to add real-time traffic conditions, and traffic cams, to the GPS mapping system in your car. Every day on the way home I exit from the freeway one exit early because about 20% of the time traffic is backed up and it takes 30 min to get to the next exit. When traffic isn't backed up staying on the freeway saves 10 minutes. But for me arriving at a predictable time is more important that trying to beat the odds. If I could access a traffic cam from my car a few minutes before I got to that exit it would be soooo cool.
The downside is once there is significant adoption of this tech then everybody will know about that crash that has the freeway tied up, and having the info won't help me because everybody else will already be clogging up the alternate routes.
-- QED
Forget war-driving, pull up a lawn chair and do some war-sitting!
Slashdot: Ask a purely humourous science/technical based question, get a rediculously rigorous science/technical answer :)
:D
Question: if my car goes 70 miles/hour and my wifi goes 11Mbs, will the overall packet speed be bigger?
Answer: If you are driving directly towards the base station, you'll get about 1.2 extra bits per second. If you are driving directly away from it, you'll lose about 1.2 bits per second.
However I think you were technically mistaken in asking about an 11Mbps wifi speed. The relevant link in this story is the 3G mobile portion of the connection which, if I am not mistaken, is a 384Kbps connect. Assuming we reinterpret your question with that correction, we get:
Correct Answer: 0.04s bits per second.
A further interesting note is that the 3G specifications generally sets a 0.1 part per million frequency lock tolerance for user hardware. It may or may not be a coincidence that that 0.1 part per million tolerance happens to equal the frequency distortion of driving 67MPH. If you try driving at some multiple of that speed you will quickly start experiencing network stability issues. If you had some insanely fast rocket car, the connection would break entirely long before the data transfer speed could be noticably increased.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I went on a road trip to Chicago and we had a router and two laptops hooked up in the car. The best part was that we could book the hotels as we went on the trip.
R oadTrip/photo#5014174202670656562
http://picasaweb.google.com/sriram.venkataramani/
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
kinda reminds me of cory doctorow's "eastern standard tribe" [1], where ad-hoc mesh networks are formed between cars and they share music. there are many beneficial uses for ad-hoc networks. i own an linksys WRT45-GL wireless router (runs linux, of course) and participiate in the freifunk project [2] (although not very long) b/c city-wide mesh networks fascinated me the moment i heard of them. big freifunk-enabled areas are in berlin, weimar and leipzig (when you are visiting the latter, look out for BSSID "ca:ff:ee:ba:be").
i could easily imagine that some ad-hoc chatting protocol (zeroconf anyone ?) could be used to form an IRC-like chat when stuck in traffic. or someone starts to stream a movie (i am waiting for "matrix vista"). possibilities are endless.
[1] http://www.craphound.com/est/
[2] http://freifunk.net/ (german)
... wireless LAN is. as others have pointed out, an ad-hoc network between vehicles could easily provide information about traffic jams or be used to (video-/voip-)chat.
I have heard it told that the speed of a moving car is enough to screw up US digital broadcast TV signals. And it has to be taken into account for GPS reception (well the sats move much faster than most everything on the gound canmove...)
So why would doppler not be a problem with WiFi? I'm just thinking out loud here...
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Car TV's that have been installed properly, will, if in viewable range of the driver, disable the screen while the e-brake is off. That gives the driver the ability to watch shows while parked (good for, say, truckers or distance-drivers that want a break), but does not allow for watching-while-driving (unless one wants to grind the e-brake down to the nub). Of course, many shops and self-installs bypass this by attaching the safety connector to ground. My car has a DVD player, but the screen isn't installed by default so the safety is disabled. When I have passengers who want to watch, I just pass them back the screen and some headphones (my JVC unit allows them to watch/hear the DVD, and me to plug an Mp3 player into the deck-amp so I can still have my own tunes).
However, I believe that by law, a screen visible to the driver is/should be disabled when the e-brake is off or perhaps when the vehicle is out of park if possible. Applying this to wifi wouldn't be too difficult either, especially if this is a factory install.
I must ask though, why do you need wifi in a car? If you need a laptop signal then an ethernet jack in the center console would work fine, even if it is piggybacking on a wireless system.
Articles discussing this include:
California has had bans for a couple of years on using laptops in the front seats of cars, as well as on having DVD players there. Basically the only display screens you can have visible to the driver are for controls and navigation equipment. So your GPS is fine, but running Google Maps on your laptop isn't.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
... everytime you drive in one of our cars :-)
... I don't however carry my mobile on my body but keep it in briefcase. I also turn off all
No honestly, I am into wireless technology like everybody else, I use mobile phones, I use
bluetooth to connect that mobile phone to my notebook and I hava a wireless hotspot at
home so I can sit outside without having to throw a ethernet line out the window.
But
these other devices when I'm done using them.
Somehow I don't think you can turn off the access point in those cars so you'll most likely
be zapped at close range with a full watt 802.11 beacon frame from it ten times a second
as you drive.
Car A, traveling 70 miles per hour (mph) with a 802.11b (11 MBPS) WiFi Hotspot, leaves Westford heading toward Eastford, 260 miles away. At the same time Car B, traveling 60 mph with a 802.11g (56 MBPS) WiFi Hotspot, leaves Eastford heading toward Westford. When do the two cars meet? How far from each city do they meet? When can a person in Car B pick up the WiFi signal of Car A, and when does interference cancel both out?
Unless you're Buckaroo Banzai or perhaps St. Anselm, that's a highly doubtful proposition.
I can see bad movies being written around this.
Will the packets of and oncoming car be compressed
so why would you need to bridge it to 802.11? Just connect the HSDPA or UMTS receiving device via USB. After all, how much do you move around inside a car?
Set your phasers on "funky"!
.... to tail-gate cars !!!
In 2 dimensions, a reasonable approximation for a radar gun, or if you are driving directly toward an RF source, the ratio of the shift is 2V/c. At 100 fps, that's about 2E-7, or a couple dozen Hz at 100 Mc. This is how doppler speed guns and doppler radar work, and they can easy pick out speed variations of a few MPH. For GPS there is much less effect because the sats don't move directly toward or away from the observer, but, still, as I understand it, some GPS units can measure the phase difference (http://www.aprs.net/vm/gps_cs.htm) and account for it in the calculations.
Like you I'm doubtful any consumer RF protocol like digital TV requires this kind of accuracy.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
I think you meant to say "Internet use."
What still baffles me is how ingrained it is in North American culture that you have to drive alone, and that passengers don't exist. (Well, actually cars altogether...)
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Alcohol-detecting ignition interlocks are all the rage in the war on drunk driving. Toyota is preparing a triple-whammy system for deployment at the end of 2009: automated analysis of hand sweat, erratic steering and even out-of-focus pupils, although I wouldn't call it "failsafe" as many reports do.
;-)
http://tinyurl.com/yfyldy
Electronic distractions are more easily eliminated. All that's needed is elementary communication between distracting devices and cars. When the wheels are turning, only 911 calls are allowed. No Bluetooth, no WiFi, no TV signals or DVD playing, etc. Exceptions for AM/FM and satellite radio stations that pledge to play only commercial-free pre-1990 formats.