GM Sees a Market For $5/Day Dedicated In-Car Internet

An anonymous reader writes "$5 doesn't sound like much for a day of internet service in some contexts: it's less than you might pay for it in-flight, and less than a few espresso drinks if you're lured in by a coffee shop's Wi-Fi service. But not all internet service is created equal; would you pay $5 for a month of in-car internet service if it meant a 200-meg cap, which is (only) 'enough to stream more than 6.5 hours of music?' That's where a new dedicated Internet service from GM starts (also at the WSJ, paywalled), and it's $10 for drivers who aren't also OnStar subscribers. Probably a more likely option for the occasional road trip, though, is $5 per day service (no OnStar requirement) for 250MB of data. Why wouldn't someone just use a smartphone with a data plan, or a dedicated hotspot device? GM thinks they'll be drawn to 'a powerful antenna that's stronger than that of a smartphone, along with a Wi-Fi hotspot that operates without draining a mobile device's battery. That hotspot is on any time the car is on.'"

Comments

"GM thinks" there's your problem.

[nospam007]

"GM thinks they'll be drawn to 'a powerful antenna that's stronger than that of a smartphone, along with a Wi-Fi hotspot that operates without draining a mobile device's battery. That hotspot is on any time the car is on.'

My car also has a 'powerful antenna' for my cellphone and my phone has a Wifi-hotspot and it also doesn't drain the mobile's battery because by cellphone is in its socket and powered by the car battery. I pay 5 bucks a month for unlimited usage already.

We should we pay twice?

Re:"GM thinks" there's your problem.

[PolygamousRanchKid]

GM got bailed out by the government because it was "too big to fail." Guess what? GM is still "too big to fail."

They can go ahead and try out any screwball idea they want. If it loses money . . . the government will pick up the tab.

It's sort of like a venture capital investment operation . . . except the taxpayers get stuck with the losses, and none of the rewards.

Re:"GM thinks" there's your problem.

[TigerTime]

How about this: They provide BOTH options and we'll see which one is more popular in 2 years.

Whichever car company makes it easy for my phone to be the brains of the entertainment system, and their screen just be a dumb terminal for my phone's data will get to sell me a new car.

Re:"GM thinks" there's your problem.

[Albanach]

I'm not the OP, but I use this booster in the car. I use the larger antenna and get a huge signal boost. I get 3G where I'd normally only have edge, and a signal in areas where my phone normally reports no signal at all. The booster uses a USB connector to charge, so I have a $10 two port USB charger in the car that supplies power to both the booster and my phone.

The booster only works while the phone is in the cradle, so calls need to be by speaker or bluetooth.

Re:"GM thinks" there's your problem.

[Opportunist]

Privatize profits, socialize losses.

Capitalism and communism, finally united in harmony.

Still stuck in an analogue thinking pattern

[faffod]

When everything was analogue, you needed a custom device for each service (phone, TV, fax, etc). In the digital era that way of thinking is as archaic as the dinosaur. I do not want an internet connection that might be slightly better than my current phone, only to be left in the dust in a couple of years. I want a system that allows me to add my phone's internet the car seamlessly.
Yes someone is monetizing my mobile internet; no that doesn't mean that I want everyone monetizing it over and over again.

Re:Still stuck in an analogue thinking pattern

[j-beda]

Given all that we know about GM, can someone explain (aside from the obvious political reasons / TBTF), why this company was bailed out? Romney was correct, it should have been allowed to go bankrupt. In addition, the taxpayer still had to eat a $10 billion loss. GM management was incompetent to the core. This idea is yet another example of it for all of the reasons you list and more.

The question is would letting GM go bankrupt have resulted in more than 10 billion in losses in terms of lost payroll taxes and increased social assistance benefits for all of the GM workers and all of the assorted companies that also would have gone under?

Further down in the linked article is "On all TARP investments to date, including the sale of Treasury’s shares in AIG, the government has recovered a total of $432.7 billion on $421.8 billion disbursed. " so overall, it doesn't look like all the TARP funds were such a bad investment even from a straight purchase-sale calculation.

Of course, it is much harder to figure out if, long term, this was a good policy - would the economy have been better off to "kill off" the sick or better off in "healing" the sick? Have any of the "sick" been healed or are they still "sick"? Have we ensured similar things don't happen in the future?

I don't have high hopes for answers to these sorts of questions.

Re:32GB is useless because of DRM

[steveg]

Are there still cars with built in storage?

Ford included a whopping 10GB hard disk in their fanciest tech package 5 years ago. You can't get that now. Instead you get a USB port in the center console.

I've got a 64G low profile thumb drive plugged in with most of my music collection. Standard MP3s, no DRM issues. There are *other* issues -- the system has only so many slots to hold metadata, so if I add too many songs it will freak out and re-index the USB each time I start the car. But as long as I don't exceed some limit it behaves just fine.

For my purposes anyway, no storage and USB is far superior to built-in storage.

Re:My honest response to $5/day for 250MB

[Opportunist]

You'll pay for it. Either now or with the next bailout when that bomb drops.