Slashdot Mirror
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.
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'
Bite my shiny metal ass.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.