Road Warriors Can Stay Connected Without Wires

Need to get online easily and cheaply with your laptop while waiting at airports, meetings or on long flights? Wish you could call several people nationwide instantaneously, even when cell phone calls can’t connect?

These and other enhancements now are possible, thanks to three recent technological advances that are helping road warriors stay connected.

Progress in wireless Internet access, through so-called Wi-Fi technology, is enabling business travelers to access e-mail with laptops or hand-held devices at major airports, hotels, restaurants and other public venues. Even some workplaces are installing the service, enabling meeting participants to stay online while conducting business.

Push-to-talk phones, providing walkie-talkie-like service with nationwide access, allow travelers to reach several people coast-to-coast simultaneously in less than a second. They also serve as convenient backups when cell phone calls can’t get through. Competition is heating up, as Nextel Communications Inc.’s dominance in this field is being challenged by Verizon Wireless and other telecom giants.

And breakthroughs in in-flight text messaging are allowing passengers to stay online, at low cost, for an entire flight. United and Continental airlines are offering such services, with more carriers to follow.

Such advances bring closer the promise of travelers staying connected 24/7.

Wi-Fi

The most prominent and fastest growing of these advances is Wi-Fi, which offers inexpensive Internet access at venues frequented by travelers.

Wi-Fi, short for wireless fidelity, consists of a small transmitter that radiates high-speed Internet connections as much as 300 feet via radio waves. Newer laptops automatically detect Wi-Fi enabled areas, called “hot spots.” Others easily can be made to do so by inserting a wireless card.

Thus, people with Wi-Fi enabled laptops or personal digital assistants are just a few clicks away from being online. Hot spots increasingly are found in hotels, coffeehouses and airline VIP lounges, as well as city parks, college campuses and restaurants. The Marriott, Omni, Hyatt, Four Seasons, Fairmont, Sheraton, W, Westin and Wyndham hotel chains also offer Wi-Fi at some or all of their properties. Hot spots can be found in the international terminal and terminals 7 and 8 at Los Angeles International Airport, in dozens of Starbucks coffee shops across Los Angeles, in several Borders bookstores and throughout the USC campus, to name a few of many local venues. Companies are quickly announcing plans to install additional hot spots in trains, planes and ferries -- even in recreational-vehicle parks and gas stations.

But despite this rush to create hot spots -- and huge capital outlays for Wi-Fi equipment by Intel Corp., Microsoft Corp., Cisco Systems Inc., AT&T; Corp. and other high-tech titans -- experts say it will be at least several years before hot spots are common. Until then, finding them may be hit or miss.

Excluding airline clubs and frequent-flier lounges, only about a dozen airports in the United States -- the global leader in Wi-Fi rollout -- have a hot spot, and few hotels charging less than $75 a night offer Wi-Fi to guests. (Visit www.wifinder.com or www.wifi411.com for hot spot locations.) However, with time Wi-Fi will be pervasive, experts agree. William Clark, a principal at technology research firm Gartner Inc., estimates there will be 28,680 public hot spots in North America and 71,079 worldwide by year’s end, and those numbers will double in five years.

Fueling the growth: Wi-Fi is cheap, and getting cheaper. Many hot spots already are available free because of rising competition. The most widely deployed Wi-Fi access card -- the 802.11b, a saltine-thin device that slips into a laptop -- sells for about $45, down from $100 earlier this year.

Most technologies evolve sporadically, with varying degrees of awareness and acceptance. Wi-Fi, in contrast, has achieved global recognition rapidly and its user base is mushrooming. John Yunker, an analyst at Pyramid Research, anticipates the number of worldwide Wi-Fi users to soar from 9 million presently to more than 700 million by 2008.

Yunker expects hotels to lead the Wi-Fi charge over the next year, followed by fast-food restaurants and specialty locations such as entertainment venues, truck stops and bookstores. Only about 1,000 hotels worldwide offered Wi-Fi at the start of this year. That figure will climb to 25,000 by 2007, he predicted.

Airports worldwide have been slower than hotels to establish hot spots. But there too change is occurring.

“For the jet-setting crowd, you should, in a couple of years, be able to walk into an international airport anywhere in the world and expect to get on Wi-Fi,” Gartner’s Clark said.

Companies increasingly are creating hot spots for employees, aware that business travel doesn’t necessarily mean leaving the country or even leaving town.

At Pasadena-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory, most buildings are rigged for Wi-Fi. Mark Adler, deputy mission manager on the Mars exploration-rover program there, said wireless Internet access has changed how the Mars team works.

Team members spend most meeting time with their laptops open, sending and responding to e-mail, he said. As conversation shifts from one subject to another, co-workers alert those in the room who should do so to log off and tune in.

“It actually works out OK, because even though not everybody will be paying attention to the meeting, if you need to pay attention you get woken up,” Adler said. “It’s like, ‘Hey, Rob, you need to listen to this.’ But you’re there. You get a lot of stuff done that way.”

Likewise, Parsons Corp., the giant planning, engineering and construction firm based in Pasadena, has started installing Wi-Fi on its premises to facilitate meetings.

Chuck Harrington, president of the company’s Commercial Technology Group, said Wi-Fi is particularly helpful to Parsons’ visitors. During breaks, they can attend to e-mail or access files off Parsons’ servers to prepare for presentations, without having to search for an empty office and phone jack.

Many business travelers are taking a wait-and-see approach toward Wi-Fi. But Clark said there’s no need to wait. He noted that people strolling through the financial district of any large American city with an eye on their Wi-Fi enabled devices would see Wi-Fi networks appear and disappear. Some of the networks charge a fee, but others don’t.

Walkie-Talkie Phones

Nextel has been offering push-to-talk technology on a regional basis for a decade as an option on some Motorola-made cellular phones. But the Virginia-based wireless telephone company recently extended its coverage nationwide.

Although the Nextel Motorola phone also offers cellular dialing, the push-to-talk feature allows near-instant connection -- there’s no ring time, waiting for the other party to pick up -- which can be helpful to persons on the road and in a hurry. Travelers also benefit because push-to-talk generally provides better reception than cellular technology inside buildings, such as airports and train stations.

Verizon Wireless last month began offering a Motorola phone with a push-to-talk feature that utilizes circuit-based networks. AT&T; Wireless, Cingular Wireless and other U.S. carriers will do the same in the coming months. But unlike Nextel’s Direct Connect service, which is based on a standard ideal for near-instant party-to-party connectivity, the service offered by the other companies will suffer from a time-lag problem -- think of ring delay without the ring.

The major disadvantage of push-to-talk technology is that the other party also must be using a push-to-talk phone. Always being connected can be disadvantageous as well. “If you don’t want to be reached instantly, it can be a bother,” said Craig Mathias, a principal of Farpoint Group, an Ashland, Mass., advisory firm specializing in mobile technologies.

For some people, the push-to-talk feature is a good backup.

Dan Estrada, a quality project manager at the Metropolitan Transit Authority in Los Angeles, spends much of his working day outside the office. He likes the fact that if he’s having trouble getting cellular reception, he can try push-to-talk, and vice versa. One usually will work when the other won’t.

Estrada likes the walkie-talkie feature for another reason: Like instant messaging, the last party contacted remains on the screen after a chat for easy reconnection. That allows for numerous back-and-forth connections without having to go to an address book, find the party’s name, hit a button and waiting for the other party to pick up.

With Verizon in the fray and others to follow, rates are expected to fall. Nextel subscribers pay on average $67 a month for phone plans that include cellular and Direct Connect features, or $13 more than most people pay for their cellular-only plans.

In-Flight E-Mail

E-mail access on airline flights has been available for years. But until recently it was as if you had to sell your home to pay for e-mailing at 37,000 feet.

Continental and United airlines now offer inexpensive in-flight e-mail and instant messaging services on a growing number of flights. Their JetConnect service is provided by Seattle-based Tenzing Communications and Verizon Airfone, a subsidiary of Verizon Communications.

Customers access JetConnect by plugging their laptops into jacks on Verizon Airfone handsets on seatbacks of 123 Continental and 110 United planes. Those numbers will grow to 411 for Continental and 525 for United by year’s end, and Cathay Pacific will equip its entire 75-plane fleet with JetConnect next year, Tenzing Chief Executive Alan McGinnis said.

Users pay $6 for one-way text messaging or $16 for two-way e-mail for the flight; there is no per-minute charge. There is a per-kilobyte charge for each e-mail more than 2 kilobytes. So, uploading or downloading large files will cost an additional 10 cents for every kilobyte over the two allowed. Boeing Co. will roll out a competing service in March, beginning with transatlantic and Asia-Europe routes flown by Lufthansa and British Airways. A Boeing spokesman said fees of $25 to $35 for an international flight, and lower for a domestic flight, are being considered. Users must install software to use the service.