Thread: Autonet Wifi for your car?? Worth the $199??

Originally Posted by soloxp

[Only disadvantage is the phone can only handle one PC at a time.]

I don't know what phone you have that can only handle 1 pc at a time...My internet went down for 3hrs one day. So I setup my Android G1...my wife, son and my pc was connect to my G1 3g with no problem.

Must be a iphone

It is and I was using PDAnet. You connect from the phone to the laptop's WiFi, so just one computer using that technique. There may be other ways but I haven't looked into them.

Honestly, in my car, I have a sheeva plug($100) , a verizon 3g usb dongle ($0), and a wifi router ($25)...

That's $125, and that gives me a full linux computer that can stay on 24/7.

Of course, setting this up was a bit of work. I had to change the linux distro on the sheeva, setup routing, dhcp server, dns, but it was only about 4 hours of time spent.

So what I'm getting at is $200 is way too much money.

Originally Posted by Cartastic

Yeah .. but how much is it montlhy for 1 gig of data? ATT charges $40 for 200megs and Verizon is $59... of course they make you have a 1 year contract .. so in the long run ... it's pricey... the Autonet one is only $29 a month .. which is way cheaper in the long run....
Who are you buying your data from ??? How much for 1 gig? I never really go over 8megs

AT&T charges $30/mo (as of today 08/09/2009) for unlimited data (which is really 2Gb/mo as explained before). That's $1 more per month for something you can take anywhere, connect any number of devices to, is not a unitasker, is usable in 95% of the world, and has better coverage areas.

And for the 1yr contract, who doesnt already have a cell phone? And for those that don't how many of them would want a wifi router in the car or even know what wifi is? The contract is really a moot point.

Originally Posted by nitehawk

Here's a good question, what type of technology does the autonet use? Is it Cell, Sat, LRM?

It uses cellular tech:
"What kind of speeds can I expect?

Over the 3G network, download speeds average from 400kps-800kps. Upload ranges from 128kps-300kps. When not on 3G the average download is 120kps-200kps and 50kps-100kps for upload."

link: http://www.autonetmobile.com/support/faq/#7

Originally Posted by freeflashstuff

It uses cellular tech:
"What kind of speeds can I expect?

Over the 3G network, download speeds average from 400kps-800kps. Upload ranges from 128kps-300kps. When not on 3G the average download is 120kps-200kps and 50kps-100kps for upload."

link: http://www.autonetmobile.com/support/faq/#7

and to add to that, the person who was not getting reliable results tethering a phone, will not see reliable results using this. It is the EXACT same chipset. The only difference might be it proxies it to fool stupid browsers (cough IE cough) that the connection is still going even if it isn't. That's a complete guess though. Note that with Firefox you can go to a site start the download, turn off your wifi and then almost immediately turn it back on making windows do the ip refresh simulating mobile tethering and it will resume where it left off as long as it doesnt take longer than the timeout time (which is configurable).