You’re sitting in a coffee shop waiting for a sales meeting and you realize that you are a single marketing statistic away from a fabulous presentation. If only you were back at your desk, you could google the info you need. Alas, you’re in a coffee shop. Too bad you and the shop aren’t WiFi equipped.

WiFi. It rhymes with hi-fi and stands for wireless fidelity and it’s taking your and everybody else’s sector by storm. If you conduct any business outside the office, or if you’re considering outfitting your fleet with the latest communications systems, you must consider WiFi. It’s easy to use (via a simple PC card inserted in your laptop or PDA), cheap, and it gives you the same connection to the Internet or your corporate network as if you were still tied to your desk, providing you’re not too far from a specially designed WiFi “hotspot.”

A hotspot is like a mini-satellite station that lets your wireless computer communicate with the rest of the online world. Hotspots are springing up everywhere-on campuses, coffee shops, and, in hotel lobbies. “The number of commercial hotspots in Canada is expected to grow at an annual rate of 143 per cent for the next five years,” says Warren Chaisatien, Senior Telecom Analyst, IDC Canada. And that includes truck stops.

With an appropriately tricked-out laptop, if you’re at, say, a Flying J (the chain is leading the charge on WiFi use at truck stops), you can sit in your cab and surf the net or access email or get information from your company server. And it’ll only cost you a subscriber fee of about $30 US per month.

More and more laptop computers are shipping with built-in WiFi capability so you don’t even need the card. Sony, for instance, includes WiFi capability in its new $999 CLIE handheld PDA.

It follows, then, that more truckers are seeing WiFi’s advantages. “There are three million trucks in the United States using mobile networks, 22 per cent of them with laptops,” says Mark Pineau, principal with the mobile solutions group at Fujitsu Consulting, an international provider of network management solutions. “IBM is now in the process of rolling out 1,000 hotspots in truck stops across the United States. And Canada’s mobile carriers (Telus Mobility, Bell Mobility, and Rogers AT&T) are the first in North America to sign roaming agreements with each other for hotspots so that users will have coast-to-coast wireless network coverage.”

The arrival of WiFi isn’t all sunshine and roses. One of the most important issues facing WiFi users is security.
If you’re using a WiFi-enabled laptop to connect from a hotspot at your local fuel stop to your company network, you’re going to want the same levels of security you’d have if you were connecting via your desktop computer and a wired connection.

That kind of security is possible with WiFi, but it will mean that your company’s IT team will have to get involved in your WiFi setup. “Any concerns about security and WiFi are surmountable,” says Fujitsu’s Pineau.

There’s one more thing about WiFi. Outfitting your fleet with WiFi-equipped laptops would be a fabulous recruitment tool. Imagine telling your drivers they’d have wireless
Internet access from their sleeper cabs.

They’d never be far from their WiFi’sTwo things you don’t have to know about WiFi…
w WiFi is shorthand for IEEE 802.11, a high-speed mobile-communications network standard.

w WiFi replaces wires with small, low-powered, two-way radios and allows the wireless transmission of 11 Mbps of raw data at distances from several dozen to several hundred feet over the 2.4 GHz unlicensed band.

And one you must
w WiFi is surprisingly cheap. At most hotspots, you can get unlimited usage for about $30 per month. Some hotels and coffee shops let you surf for free. This can cut down on long-distance bills considerably.