Portable Wi-Fi Hotspots 98
Dekortage writes "David Pogue reviews several portable wi-fi access points in the New York Times. If you have cellular Internet access, you can plug the PC card into the wi-fi box and presto, you've got Wi-Fi from wherever you are." From the article: "The card provides the Internet connection, courtesy of those companies' 3G ("third generation") high-speed cellular data networks. The box just rebroadcasts that connection as a Wi-Fi signal so that all nearby computers -- not just one privileged laptop -- can go online. With those PC cards, you can go online anywhere there's a cellular signal: in a taxi, on a bus, in a waiting room or wherever. In major cities, the speed is delightful, like a D.S.L. or slowish cable modem (400 to 700 kilobits a second)."
The price is prohibitive here as well (Score:4, Informative)
Not to mention the old saying "I got WiFi access now, my neighbor bought an Access Point". Who's want to run an AP through a line that's probably costing more than your rent if some leecher finds your AP? How secure can those APs be made so it's possible to make sure you're not going to invite everyone on the airport to a P2P party?
Re:The price is prohibitive here as well (Score:3, Informative)
Alas, at least in my experience, it's definitely "unlimited" rather than truly unlimited. I used to listen to Shoutcast and other internet radio stations regularly on my Treo 600, but after a few months of this got a phone call from Sprint PCS telling me to stop using up so much bandwidth.
Re:Does Unlimited really mean Unlimited yet ? (Score:3, Informative)
Rogers, Cogeco, and others (Toronto area) have already come up with the "excuse" to limit bandwidth far below the rates they advertise. In some cases their traffic shaping results in poorer performance than you'd get with an old dial-up modem.
In most industries you're expected to grow your capacity to service the market. With cablecos, they'd rather charge you the full price and limit your service. The problem is, why pay for an "extra fast" link if it doesn't even perform as well as the "light" package is supposed to?