Broadband on wheels

[Klaus]

What's hot and what's not in car tech

Broadband on wheels

By Brian Cooley

Editor at large

August 23, 2006

WiMax keeps on coming. Sprint will launch mobile WiMax broadband access in Q4 2007. That means another form of wireless broadband that could be used in your car and one that will compete with the offerings coming from 3G cellular technology. Speed is predicted to hit 2Mbps to 5Mbps, which beats the pants off the 400Kbps to 700Kbps we get today from 3G cellular. Clearly, cellular will be under pressure to speed way up, and both services will be under pressure to come way down in price. Sprint forecasts pricing for mobile WiMax to start around $20 a month for up to 1GB of transfer, which isn't much--about 10 hours of 28Kbps audio streaming, by my rough calculations.


Think I'm nuts with all this in-car broadband stuff? It's not just me. ABI Research says the car is the next (and perhaps final?) big battleground for the major portal players, such as Google, MSN, AOL, and Yahoo. With in-car broadband and text-to-speech technology, you can really unlock the value of the local information that is built into Google Maps, CitySearch, Yahoo's many local editions, and the emerging Windows Live Local. Those are all compelling phone services, but the car is really enticing with its greater appetite for destinations and directions, not to mention a typically better interface--or at least a passenger who can devote a set of eyes to scraping info from a local-savvy portal.

Future collectible alert: cars with iPod adapters. You probably heard that Apple cut deals to get iPod adapters offered in a slew of cars from GM, Ford, and Mazda. All three of these carmakers could use a little hip ink these days, and maybe that's the best part of the announcements. Way too many GM and Ford products sell to an old, technologically lame consumer base. I also foresee a day not too long from now when a car with an iPod adapter seems quaint and collectible, as Bluetooth A2DP and maybe even Wireless USB connections take over and offer a standard way to connect portables to cars. Read on.

Has Sony regained its cleverness? The company's new MEX-BT5000 car stereo head unit seems to be the kind of in-car Swiss Army Knife of entertainment and communication I've been pining for. It automatically pairs with cell phones and other portables that have Bluetooth, which I admit are pretty rare these days, but the new A2DP Bluetooth profile is still fairly new itself. Of course the unit also contains an integrated hands-free kit for speakerphone capability with a cell phone. On the audio side, it handles MP3s, WMAs, and of course, Sony's hoary old ATRAC format, which has overstayed the digital audio party longer than Mel Gibson at a bar in Malibu. It's also sat radio-ready, but most importantly it's not a multi-thousand dollar part--MSRP will be $400.

It's not quite Fifth Ave, but Garmin is helping the cause of tech by opening a GPS showcase on a rather expensive piece of the Miracle Mile in Chicago's Loop. This must certainly be the first time a GPS products company has opened such a chic awareness spot. A la the Apple Stores, it will not just sell gear but have an array of factory-trained folks there who will hopefully be as genuinely helpful as Apple's Genius Bar staff.

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[Big Z]

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