Wireless Home Networking - Index of

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Part IV: Using a Wireless Network
Another manufacturer, Z-App Systems (www.zappsys.com), announced a
home Wi-Fi audio system called the AL-1 in January 2007. The AL-1 (which
will have a list price of $499) is the centerpiece of a family of Wi-Fi music gear.
One part of this family, the MP-1, will bring your car into the Wi-Fi era by
automatically synchronizing a copy of the music stored on your AL-1 onto the
MP-1’s internal hard drive via the Wi-Fi connection. This system isn’t on the
market yet, and we don’t even know what the price will be, but it’s worth
keeping an eye on the Web site if Wi-Fi music is what you need for your car!
Other car manufacturers have likewise shown prototypes of various systems,
but the Omnifi remains the only mass market product we’ve seen that’s
explicitly designed for the home-car linkage. It remains your best bet, if you
can find one.
If you want to build a full-fledged car computer, check out the section later in
this chapter, “Getting online with your own car PC.”
Turning your car into a hot spot
In Chapter 16, we talk about cellular data services that you can access
with your laptop when you’re on the go — or from home if you’re sitting
on the couch. With unlimited data access, you can hop on the Internet anywhere.
EV-DO is a popular data service offered by companies such as Sprint
(www.sprint.com) and Verizon (www.verizon.com); AT&T offers a similar
service called HSDPA (also discussed in Chapter 16).
Some brainy folks thought to marry these data services with Wi-Fi to create
instant Wi-Fi hot spots anywhere you want — in your car, on your boat, or in
the middle of a park. New devices called wireless WAN routers (where WAN
means wide area network) interface with your cellular data service on the
one hand and your Wi-Fi network on the other.
There’s no one name for these routers. You can also find them as EV-DO
routers, HSDPA routers, 3G routers, or wireless cellular routers — but not
wireless mobile routers — these are usually just Wi-Fi travel routers.
Consumer-grade versions are in the $200 to $300 range, and commercial
ones can cost more than $500.
You need to get the model that is compatible with your network provider.
Kyocera has an 802.11n version called the KR2 Mobile Router (www.kyocerawireless.com,
$200) that supports EV-DO services with PCMCIA, ExpressCard,
and USB connections. D-Link has its 3G Mobile Router DIR-450 (www.dlink.
com, $200) for EV-DO as well, but at the time of this writing it was 802.11g.