A new era of mobility seems to be arriving, with the success of CradlePoint’s versatile family of “WiPipe” (TM) 3G-uplinked Wi-Fi routers. The photo at right shows me using a CradlePoint CTR-500 3G+Wi-Fi router in my car.
To make a long story short, I was driving into San Francisco on a beautiful, sunny Saturday morning when suddenly traffic snarled and backed up on the freeway — as tens of thousands of SF Giant fans streamed into SF for the third game against the New York Mets.
So… I took the nearest exit in defiance of my Garmin GPS’s directives, knowing that it’s powered up my onboard pair of 120VAC onboard power inverters.
The CradlePoint doesn’t require AC power, since it is shipped with a cigar-lighter style (12V automotive style) 3G-uplinked CradlePoint Wi-Fi router, and proceeded to work online for an hour or two, until well after the traffic cleared. Remeber that old saying: “Whereever you go, there you are”? Well, that day is ARRIVING, with 3G. If Clearwire + Sprint’s “CLEAR” WiMax service, or maybe Verizon + AT&T’s LTE 4G services arrive to improve things — great. But in the meantime, that day is HERE.
I have also been using CradlePoint devices to connect to my Vidtel video phone (it has a hard-wired Ethernet port) to make Video phone (Video-enabled SIP/H.264) calls from the car. In it’s standard configuration, the Vidtel picture is pre-configured with an exchange, number, and area code; registered on the server, and defaulted to stream H.264 (MPEG4 audio+video) at about 300kbps compressed (200kbps video + 100kbps audio). The video can be backed off to about 70kbps.
For my 3G uplink, I’m paying $30 extra to go from 5GB capped to unlimited ($100 vs $70) 3G plan from Sprint, the only carrier to offer an “all you can eat” 3G data plan (thanks, Dan Hesse!). The problem is (e.g.) using a Vidtel videophone for only 10 minutes a day could put you up against all three carrier’s 5GB limit.
I’m definitely rooting for Dan Hesse and Craig McGaw to have a $100B IPO to fund “the new Clearwire”, and build out the first nationwide 4G application. That could happen, if the market holds up, as IPO’s have started to “slowly” happen again. Clearwire and Sprint are rolling out WiMax in Boise, Portland, Las Vegas, Baltimore, etc – so it’s starting to happen.
I can see that the future technology roadmap for the USA, once we have both Metro and Rural areas area bathed not only in 3G Wireless Broadband, but in WiMax Microwaves providing last-mile access to a new era of faster broadband, for applications like this one, and much better – per Dan Hesse and Craig McGaw. But politics, money, lobbying, and sheer momentum is preventing the USA from modernizing it’s broadand infrastructure. Technology will in the end, prevail – but it may take many more years than it should have. And in this sort of thing, timing is everything.
As John McQuillan once said (~1997) at his NGN (next generation networks) onference, the internet represents, potentially, the “death of distance”. And here, in 2007, is one very good example of that profound phenomena.
