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WiFi in Your Rental Car

Posted by samzenpus on from the I-need-more-distractions dept.

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."

4 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Regulation by arivanov · · Score: 3, Informative

    C'mon, that case was "a person who was well known to deserve it": http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/north_west/478568 6.stm

    Mrs Donna Marie Maddock also had her license suspended for 20 months for an alcohol related offence just before being handed this ban and these points. Whatever the courts and BBC tell I bet that the magistrates handing out the ban actually knew who is getting it and the list of her previous (or in processing) offences. In fact they definitely knew, because her solicitor has asked the judges to reduce or waive the ban because she was already serving one (the best example of Chewbacca defence I have ever heard of).

    --
    Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
    http://www.sigsegv.cx/
  2. Re:Looks like we'll have free broadband on the run by Mizled · · Score: 2, Informative

    Question: if my car goes 70 miles/hour and my wifi goes 11Mbs, will the overall packet speed be bigger? :D Doubtful considering the velocity of the packets would clearly be less than the car...my guess would be slower speeds. =p
    --
    Bite my shiny metal ass.
  3. the rollout is new, but not the tech by artifex2004 · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  4. Make it work like car TV's by phorm · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.