Portable Internet Box Takes the Web With You

By Jim Bray

Wireless Internet service is cropping up all over the place these days, including coffee shops, restaurants and bars, but many of these establishments charge a premium that could add up over time.

What if you could have your own wireless Internet service and take it with you?

Well you can, of course, otherwise this column would end now. And how would I afford groceries?

The wireless high speed Internet product I tested came from Rogers Yahoo and is a box you can take with you anywhere the service is supported. It isn't as small as those little PC card cellular modems you can get for your notebook computer, but it's probably a lot cheaper in the long run than such a PC card and its related cell phone charges.

Not only that, but if you live in the service area and your home, office, shack or hovel has good cell phone service, you can use it instead of conventional wired cable or DSL high speed Internet.

Alas, my home is in a cellular crater and so I couldn’t use it there, but I did take it “out and about” to try it in the real world outside my "ivory basement".

The modem thingy itself is about six inches square and an inch thick and plugs into your computer via its network port. The model I tried didn't come with a battery, so you need to be near a wall socket, but despite that oversight I can see it being a terrific tool for people who are forced out of the office regularly yet who need Internet access when they’re gone. Perhaps if you're in sales and need to check for a product's availability while making a presentation to a client – or a real estate agent trying to find a suitable property for a potential customer.

Or maybe just for people addicted to the web. I wish I'd taken the magic box on vacation with me when I was forced to spend a couple of weeks away from the Internet (and thought I was going to die).

I tested the technology in a couple of remote circumstances and, though my tests suffered from cell phone drop outs I hadn't expected would be a problem (which proves it pays to read the literature!), for the most part the service worked fine.

The first test was in the back seat of a Toyota Camry as my wife chauffeured me around town while I surfed the web and sent/received email. That was cool, indeed. I used an adapter to plug the unit’s AC power cord into the car’s auxiliary output and it worked well.

Well, it worked well until we traveled from one cell to another, at which time it dropped out because this particular service doesn't "hand-off" the signal from one tower to another the way conventional cell phones do. This means you have to be stationary – or zipping around in a small area, to exploit the service properly.  Not a big deal.

I also tested the service in, well it was a bar – just for the scientific purposes of the test, you understand – and, other than some strange looks it generated from suds-imbibers, it worked perfectly. All I had to do was find a wall plug, plug in the Internet box, connect it to and fire up my notebook, and I was in cyberspace quicker than you can say virtual reality.

As with conventional high speed Internet service, the connection is always live and the company claims you get speeds of up to 1.5 mbps download and 256 kbps upload, which should be adequate for most "mainstream" applications.

My test unit came courtesy of Canada’s Rogers network (similar services are available in the U.S. from Clearwire, Beamspeed, SpeedNet and others). Rogers sells the service for $60 a month (the hardware costs $99 with a one year contract) and it comes with five email accounts, antivirus protection, parental controls, pop-up blocker, spam control, etc.

The system is a tad ungainly; if it were about a third of its size it would be just about perfect – but it does appear to work as advertised.