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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."

2 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Regulation by Silver+Sloth · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I don't know about the US, and IANAL, but here in the UK there's the offense of 'Driving without due care and attention'. Whilst driving while using a laptop is not specifically illegal the courts would use 'due care and attention' in the same way that they would for those caught reading whilst driving - or in on recent famous case, applying make-up

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  2. Using a Wifi device in a car by MosesJones · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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