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August 18, 2004

Still an Access Gap

By Nancy Gohring

Mike Wendland of the Detroit Free Press writes about wireless connectivity options when Wi-Fi isn’t available: He looks at a Blackberry, the Treo 600 smartphone and a data card from Verizon. The bottom line is that none of the options is ideal. The subscription for the Verizon card is too expensive and the handhelds are too limited in what users can do with them.

With all the different available wireless technologies, it’s amazing that none of them is quite right for mass appeal. I wrote a story a couple of weeks ago looking at a handful of those technologies and I didn’t have the space to even mention all of the options. I got an email from a reader bemoaning the loss of Ricochet’s service and asking if I knew of anything similar that’s available now. Ricochet seems like ancient history these days so it’s amazing that a similar solution with a solid business plan hasn’t emerged yet.

The combination of cellular data and Wi-Fi may ultimately offer the ideal solution—true high speed when it’s available, slower but usable data rates elsewhere. It seems that service, with a decent price and solid client devices, can’t come soon enough.

Posted by nancyg at August 18, 2004 4:28 PM

Categories: 2.5G and 3G

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