Live from New York, the future appeared before my eyes. Sitting in a hotel conference center in California, my laptop was connected, without wires, to the PC Magazine e-mail system in New York City and to the Internet, at broadband speed. In five years, we'll yawn hearing such stories. Right now, surfing the Web at warp speed outside the office or home is the stuff of magic.
How much longer will it take? We are tantalizingly close to anywhere, anytime, fairly high-speed Internet connections. Within months, you'll be able to see video streamed wirelessly to your notebook PC. In a year and a half in Japan ââ,¬" and perhaps in three years in the U.S. ââ,¬" video will be delivered to cell phones. Say you're having a bad day at work, because your child seems unsettled in the new after-school day care. Wouldn't seeing her on a wireless video feed, happily playing with her friends, be soothing?
As for the wireless hotel connection, it was an oasis in the desert, just as the Marriott hotel in Palm Desert was itself. My wireless freedom was possible, because the sponsors of a road-warrior conference got one of the hotel-and-airport networking companies, Wayport, to set up a sophisticated wireless LAN in the conference center (connected to a wired line that took my signal cross-country). It was up and running for only two and a half days, and it reached only a couple hundred feet. You couldn't connect out by the pool, for example. And at the end of the two and a half days, when an alliance of PC system builders came into the same hotel, it was gone. Back in my room, there was another island of high-speed Internet connectivity: an Ethernet connection allowing wired high-speed Internet and e-mail connections, from a company called STSN.
That's the happy part. The unhappy part was making everything work. At PC Magazine, we have wireless Ethernet in the office, and I brought my Aironet card along to California. An alliance called WECA (Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance) should guarantee compatibility across brands in a year or so; mine is compatible already. But it took the better part of two days fiddling with TCP/IP settings and our VPN (virtual private network) to get all the connections working. Windows 2000 would have reduced but not eliminated the hassles. The next week, at another forum that coincidentally also had wireless networking, getting running took me just 5 minutes, but a colleague at the San Jose Mercury News found his laptop rendered inoperable by the wireless card installation.
In your hotel room, you'll pay about US$10 a day for access, which seems like a lot considering a cable modem or DSL connection at home is a dollar a day. On the other hand, when you dial back to your LAN or e-mail service, your company is paying US$5 to US$15 an hour for the toll-free line, plus hotel charges. Hotel Ethernet is cheaper for many users, though the charge appears on your personal room bill, not buried in a central-services telephone account.
I'd love to see every hotel room and conference center wired this way. But unless the hotels and service providers can quickly recoup their investments, other technologies could overtake them. For instance, the wireless Metricom Ricochet Original Modem will step up from 28 Kbps to 128 Kbps this year in a dozen cities. And the road map for cellular phones has them able to transfer data at 1-Mbps-plus speeds by 2003. Seriously. They'll be connected to your laptop either by cable or by cell-phone-to-notebook Bluetooth wireless modules. Regardless, hotels will want high-speed, in-room connections, so they can install Web-browsing terminals that could let some business people dispense with laptops and travel with just two-way pagers or Web-browsing cell phones.
When you're on the road today, what can you do to communicate more effectively?
Cell phone data transfer works ââ,¬" sort of ââ,¬" if you're using CDMA or GSM phones. TDMA (the AT&T OneRate technology) can be trying. Check out two-way pagers (the Motorola PageWriter, RIM Blackberry) with tiny keyboards; you may be able to use the same e-mail address as for your regular e-mail. Consider the Palm VII or cell-phone Web browsers.
Check out airport kiosks with T1 connections. Lobby your airline club to add Ethernet jacks to its carrels; with the way it's been raising annual dues, there's certainly money enough to pay for them.
Buy your next notebook with built-in Ethernet, or learn to carry your Ethernet card on the off chance you stumble onto a wired hotel. Check out products such as 3Com's Dynamic Access Mobile Connect Manager (US$50 street) to help cut the confusion.
