Wireless Internet Access

It’s Friday, 4:30 p.m., and the San Diego Freeway creeps along at a sluggish pace. A salesman nervously glances at his watch. He knows he has to e-mail a report to his boss before 5 p.m., but he can’t imagine where he’ll find a phone line.

Enter Wireless Internet LLC, a new commercial online service designed to help the road warrior in all of us.

The concept works like this: Data are transmitted along radio waves through a nationwide network of radio antennas. A person with a laptop computer pops in his wireless modem and logs on to the Gardena-based company.

Boom. He is now online. No phone call charges to pay, no hassles with wires. Subscribers aren’t charged for the time they’re logged on, only for the amount of data they transmit.

That’s why the service isn’t geared for people who want to surf the Web, said Wireless Internet president Matt Burnett. Registration costs $39.95, with an additional monthly service charge averaging about $60.

The service begins Oct. 1.

“This is for the person who needs remote access to a corporate intranet or someone who does a lot of on-site presentations,” Burnett said. Using Motorola software and Ram Mobile Data’s network, the service works on notebooks with Windows 95 operating system.

Wireless Internet services have remained a niche market because of past reliability and performance problems, said Bob Lewin, an analyst who tracks collaborative computing for the research firm Dataquest. But that could change as the technology evolves.

“Companies will pay for the convenience factor, even if the connection speeds are a bit slower,” Lewin said. “It’s still unclear how big this market is going to become within the next year, but it’s definitely an interesting area to watch.”

P.J. Huffstutter covers high technology for The Times. She can be reached at (714) 966-7830 and at p.j.huffstutter@latimes.com