In Car WiFi


You may have already heard that Chrysler is planning to provide in-car wireless internet access to its vehicles. If not, expect to hear more about it later this year when the requisite hardware becomes a sales-floor option, or next year when it becomes factory standard for some cars.

We can’t say it’s a bad idea, it’s just not a new one. Plenty of commercial portable routers are available, but they still need a modem and data plan to provide internet access. For internet access and wireless routing, look to [Nate True]’s cellphone-router combo, which uses a spare Nokia cellphone and a highly modded Wi-Fi router running OpenWRT. [True] has made it easy by providing the instructions and necessary custom code, but it seems like a lot of effort for a relatively slow connection. We think the original Stompbox is still the most fun since it has the speed of commercial devices and an open x86 OS to modify.

8 thoughts on “In Car WiFi

  1. Try the Nokia N95 with Joikuspot. It creates a WLAN access point with your nokia n95’s 3.5G(3.5 in australia, not sure what you guys have in america).

    I use it with an unlimited dataplan and get a solid 7.2mbps connection through most of my state. This means that all of us in the car (we’re a techie family, so everyone of us has a laptop) can use the internet through the WLAN AP.

    Just thought I’d give you all that heads up, in case you wanted to go the software route out.

  2. I’ve got a wgt634u with a prepaid razr jacked into it sitting in my office at home that’s my new vacation internet access. I’ve tossed around the idea of hooking it up in car but have to sort out the power supply first. The whole setup so far has been pretty cheap – around $75 IIRC for the phone & router (both used off ebay) and a 1ft mini-usb cable.

    It’s setup to dial on demand, so all I really have to do is plug it in and connect to the wireless, and I’m off.

  3. IIRC, my TyTN (ATT 8525) can do this out of the box, without any extra hardware. Sure the EDGE data is kinda slow, but I’m probably not going to do any better in my area (southern MD) anyway.

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