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."

Comments

In soiviet Russia

[GC]

In soviet Russia, wireless hotspots wardrive you!

Looks like we'll have free broadband on the run :)

[torex]

Question: if my car goes 70 miles/hour and my wifi goes 11Mbs, will the overall packet speed be bigger? :D

Re:Regulation

[Bloke down the pub]

We may talk funny in olde England town, but we're not entirely stupid. We've had a law on the books for some time now about "driving without due care and attention". Yes, it's vague. Yes, it's a catch all. Yes, it requires some element of judgement from 1) the driver 2) the police and 3) the justice system. And we can't be having any of that now, can we?

No no no, much better that the law tries to define exactly and explicity what you can't do while driving a motor vehicle. Let's see, item 2647a - watercolour painting, 2647b sketching with a pencil ... 2648a playing a trombone...

My client was, in fact, doing a landscape in oils and playing the clarinet when he ploughed through a red light and killed 23 people. He is innocent!

Using a Wifi device in a car

[MosesJones]

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.