Start-up expected to announce deal for Wi-Fi in Avis rental cars
To connect to a high-speed wireless network from a car, consumers pretty much have been limited to one choice: rigging a laptop computer with a special modem and subscribing to a pricey, and sometimes temperamental, wireless service.
But Autonet Mobile, a start-up wireless technology company based in San Francisco, was expected to announce this week that it had reached an agreement with Avis Rent A Car System to provide an optional wireless access point — better known as a Wi-Fi hot spot — to Avis customers in the United States by March. For an additional $10.95 a day, Avis will issue to motorists a notebook-size portable device that plugs into the power supply of a car and delivers a high-speed Internet connection for passengers.
For now, the service is intended for business travelers. But Autonet sees its service as appealing to families traveling with children, although its unit is expected to cost $399 — about twice as much as current cellular card technology — plus $49 a month for service.
A mobile Wi-Fi hot spot that lets laptops and other hand-held computers link to the Internet without cables represents an important step toward what technology experts call the "connected car" — a vehicle in which passengers' devices and the car's essential systems are always online.
"I think this is a precursor to the connected car," said Roger Entner, a wireless telecommunications analyst at Ovum, a consulting firm based in London. "This shows us a glimpse of where we will be in the future."
Maybe not yet. If the Autonet technology, called the In-Car-Router, is a milestone toward a wirelessly connected car, the road ahead may have potholes. Analysts say that the service raises questions about the legality of driving and surfing the Internet, and they note that the technology is not proven.
Avis said that it planned a formal announcement within the week but declined to comment for this article.
Instead of negotiating a connection for each device to a high-speed wireless signal at a distant cellular tower, Autonet uses a single receiver, called a wireless router, to manage the connection to a cellular tower. Then it broadcasts a wireless Internet signal to anyone within 100 feet of the car at rates of between 400 kilobits per second and 1 megabit per second. That is significantly faster than a dial-up Internet connection, which typically runs at 56 kilobits per second, but slower than some DSL phone services, which can surpass speeds of 5 megabits per second.
Sterling Pratz, the president and chief executive of Autonet, said that the company also managed to do something that, so far, had eluded competing efforts to put a wireless access point into a moving vehicle. "The car moves between high- and low-speed cellular networks, and there were problems with dropped signals," he said.
The solution was to develop a new technology that was modeled on how the space shuttle manages its Internet connection, which ensures that there are fewer dropped connections. Autonet, which uses advanced cell networks called 3G, for third generation, will work in all major U.S. metropolitan areas and in about 95 percent of the entire country, Pratz said.
But analysts say there remain some fundamental limitations with wireless technology that still need to be overcome before a system like that of Autonet is widely adopted. Even though the company may have found a way to reduce the number of dropped connections, it is impossible to eliminate them with current cellular technology, said Ken Dulaney, vice president of mobile computing at Gartner, a technology consulting firm based in Stamford, Connecticut. Any claim that someone can keep a continuous connection between towers "would be aggressive," he said.
Pratz said that his technology minimized dropped connections but did not eliminate them, and he noted that the In-Car-Router had been modified to reduce battery consumption. "In our testing, customers have told us that battery life isn't an issue because people have been able to plug their devices into the car's power supply," he said.
Questions about the legality of operating a vehicle with a Wi-Fi hot spot onboard are also likely to be raised, according to analysts. Thomas Dickerson, the author of the 2007 book "Travel Law," said that he was unaware of any prohibitions against driving a car and surfing the Internet at the same time. "But it is easy to see that a technology like this could change the way people drive, because this could take people's attention off the road," he said.
That issue looms largest for Avis, which is rolling out the product in 10 markets before the end of the first quarter. Neil Abrams, a car rental consultant at Abrams Consulting Group, said that offering a wireless hot spot "has some value" for customers who want to stay connected while they are on a business trip or vacation. "But does a rental company really want customers fooling around with a laptop while they're driving a car?" he asked. "What kind of liability issues would this raise?"
Autonet said that it was marketing its service for passengers, not drivers, and it said that Avis would require renters to agree not to hold it liable for accidents that resulted from irresponsible use of the technology.
One frequent traveler, Barry Graham, a software consultant based in Silver Spring, Maryland, said that he would rent a car with an optional wireless access point "as long as the price is right." Graham said he might even be interested in buying one for his own car.
