Snip Another Cord

Some of you have been around long enough to remember the old days of wireless communication. That is, when it meant AM radio or the CB. Things have certainly changed – and it seems that the pace is picking up. More than a few decades have passed since FM radio trumped AM, but Qualcomm and its competitors, as well as cell phones and GPS units, more recently have made important contributions to the efficiency of life on the road. In the last few years, satellite radio has been the darling of wireless communications on the road.

Now another cordless communication is becoming widely available: wireless Internet, as Senior Editor Sean Kelley reports on Page 39. Because it requires little capital investment to install at truck stops, relative to services such as the old Park’n’View telecommunications hookups, Wireless Internet, or Wi-Fi, has been deployed at hundreds of truck stops in less than two years. It will be at hundreds more by year-end.

We asked our eTrucker.com users what interest they have in using Wi-Fi once it is available at most truck stops. Of more than 1,300 readers who responded, 63 percent said they had a lot of interest, and another 21 percent said they were a little interested. No surprise. Getting online from the convenience of your cab sure beats lugging a laptop into the truck stop to find a connection. And because a Wi-Fi connection is high-speed, it’s faster than any dial-up connection – in a truck stop or your home.

Life on the road’s never smooth. When an innovation such as this can soften the edge, I say bring it on.