Waystations go wireless: high-speed Hotmail for the traveling Net junkie.

• Author: Horow, Alan S.
• Position: Tech Knowledge

YOU'RE SITTING IN A TENT in Moab, thinking about your raft trip the next morning through some heavy-duty, Class 5 whitewater in the nearby Colorado River. Your mind starts making connections -- if only you could access the daily weather report on the web, or check your email to see if your spouse sent you a virtual rabbit's foot for luck before you hit the river.... Before you know it, surf's up and you have an urge to surf the Net. Well, if you're at a KOA Kampgrounds, chances are good you could whip out your laptop, wirelessly connect to the Internet and surf all you want from the relative comfort of your tent. And you know all about such wireless connections because when you travel for business, you often stay at Marriott hotels, where you've sat in the hotel bar and spent time surfing from a bar stool.

In this manner, today's technology is making upscale hotels and back-to-the-woods campgrounds more alike than we might ever have imagined possible- both are providing wireless connections to travelers. Wireless technology of this sort may well prove to be The Next Big Thing. Two Salt Lake City companies, STSN and HOTSPOTZZ, are making a bet this is the case.

What is Wireless?

Wireless connections allow computers to get onto the Internet without physical lines (such as a telephone port or fiber optic cable) of any sort. The industry standard taking hold in the marketplace is called Wi-Fi, or Wireless Fidelity which lets computers send and receive data, both indoors and out, using radio technologies called IEEE 802.11a or IEEE 802.llb. The technology operates in the unlicensed 2.4 and 5 GHz radio bands.

What's needed: An Internet provider with a nearby base station, called an access point, and a computer with a wireless modem. Access points can be installed for as little as a few hundred dollars and cover an area radiating about 300 feet from the access point, creating a footprint called a hotspot. The connection is fast, 11Mbps maximum, which is generally speedier than either DSL (which generally has a maximum speed of 1.5 Mbps) or cable (maximum speed, 10 Mbps), and can be used to connect computers to other computers or to peripherals such as printers. Users can send and retrieve data files, access e-mail, surf the Internet, and do anything else over a wireless connection that can be done with a wired connection.

STSN

One local company hoping to ride the radio waves of wireless is STSN Inc., founded in 1998, which built its business...