Now Your Car Can Have Wi-Fi, Too

By NewsFactor Network | January 4, 2007

It’s in airports. It’s in coffee shops. It’s in your home and every FedEx Kinko’s store in the nation. And if a San Francisco-based start-up named Autonet has its way, it will be in your car, too.

It’s Wi-Fi — high-speed access to e-mail and the Internet without the annoyance of plugs and a rat’s nest of wires. Autonet plans to debut Autonet Mobile at next week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in a device that will bring Wi-Fi to your Honda or Saturn.

Of course, Autonet hopes that what happens in Las Vegas won’t stay in Las Vegas. The firm expects its product to appeal to enterprise customers and road rogues who feel ten minutes is too long to be without e-mail or access to the corporate network.

Autonet’s device, which draws power from a car’s cigarette lighter, piggybacks on the EVDO mobile broadband systems of Sprint and Verizon, then converts the data streams into a standard Wi-Fi transmission so users don’t need special equipment in their laptop computers — just the standard Wi-Fi adapters that most of today’s notebooks have by default.

Speed Problem?

EVDO is one of three mobile broadband systems in the U.S. today, and according to some experts, it’s the fastest. Sprint and Verizon have spent heavily to install EVDO networks across the nation; their rival, Cingular, has invested in HSDPA, which rivals EVDO for speed, while T-Mobile still has an older, slower system called EDGE.

But not all Autonet users will get EVDO speeds, which range between 400 and 700 Kbps. “The areas in between the major cities I’m not so convinced about,” said Eddie Hold, an analyst with research firm Current Analysis. “I don’t think most rural areas have EVDO coverage.”

Where fast coverage is not an option, Autonet will switch to slower networks that still provide data transmission…

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