Wireless Home Networking - Index of

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Part V: The Part of Tens
Car manufacturers are sensing a business
opportunity in providing connectivity to your car.
Perhaps the most well-known service is OnStar
(www.onstar.com), offered on a number of GM
and other vehicles. OnStar offers emergency car
services, such as the ones from the American
Automobile Association (AAA), with GPS and
two-way cellular communications thrown in. You
can not only make cell phone calls with the
system, but also get GM to unlock your car
doors. It’s a factory-installed-only option, so you
can’t get it if it’s not in your car when you bought
OnStar calling
it. You have to pay monthly service fees that start
at $18.95 per month, or $199.00 per year. You can
add turn-by-turn instructions for another $10.00
per month.
Other car manufacturers are following suit.
BMW offers the similar BMW Assist, for example.
We expect all car manufacturers to offer
something similar within a few years — it makes
too much sense. Check out some of the short
movies on how OnStar has gotten people out
of sticky situations at www.onstar.com/us_
english/jsp/idemo/index.jsp.
Because most cars already have a massive computing and entertainment
infrastructure, reaching out and linking that infrastructure to both the
Internet and your wireless home network is simply a no-brainer.
A wireless connection in the car enables you to talk to your car via your
wireless network. Now, before you accuse us of having gone loony for talking
to our car, think about whether your lights are still on. Wouldn’t it be great to
check from your 40th-floor apartment rather than head all the way down to
the parking garage? Just grab your 802.11g-enabled handheld computer, surf
to your car’s own Web server, and check whether you left the lights on again.
Or perhaps you’re filling out a new insurance form and forgot to check the
mileage on your car. Click over to the dashboard page and see what it says.
You can also, on request, check out your car’s exact location based on GPS
readings. (GPS is a location-finding system that effectively can tell you where
something is, based on its ability to triangulate signals from three or more
satellites that orbit the Earth. GPS can usually spot its target within 10–100
meters of the actual location.) You can, again at your request, even allow
your dealer to check your car’s service status via the Internet. You can also
switch on the lights or the auxiliary heating, for example, call up numbers in
the car telephone or addresses in the navigation system, and unlock and lock
the car — all from the wireless comfort of your couch (using some of those
neat touch-panel remote controls that we talk about in Chapter 14). Just grab
your wireless Web tablet, surf, and select. Pretty cool. The opportunities to
wirelessly connect to your automobile are truly endless.
Your car could also talk to other cars. If all cars were interconnected, information
could be daisy-chained from car to car, alerting users of obstructions
in the road or braking ahead. (Of course, this would never be used to alert