06th May 2004
Magicbike - Mobile WiFi, The Other Way Around
Just noticed in news.com a
about Magicbike In a nutshell:
a guy named Yury Gitman in NYC has a bike with an iBook, some WiFi
antennas, and the ability to serve as a mobile hotspot to anyone
within 100 meters outdoors. So it’s not so much you being the mobile one to get to WiFi - perhaps the WiFi comes to you!
So over the last few years, there’s been an impressive sequence of events:
- WiFi reaches commodity status in the home.
- Getting WiFi in a fixed location outside the home is getting
increasingly easier. Free or for-fee. T-mobile. NYCwireless. NoCatNet. - Now the hotspots are starting to move around us, amongst us.
802.11b cards are cheap cheap. Hand-me-down laptops - have
battery. will travel, will act as repeater. - The next step will be to pack this functionality into PDA/iPod/Handheld devices
Awesome. So start to imagine what happens when packaging the
laptop/connection/antennas gets easier, cheaper, and smaller. Imagine when there are so many open access points around you, that you have to apply
a trust/reputation filter just to narrow down the list of which
one you’ll pick (or just use the best signal to tunnel through to a VPN,
and not worry about it).
Getting back to Magicbike, check out the page about providing access
from a NYC Subway
Platform (for some perspective, it kind of helps if you can recall the days of 300 baud
modems, and all the limitations we put up with back then). Mobile
WiFi is just another little sliver of the future sneaking back to the
present, providing a glimpse.
