July 14, 2005
For Surfers, a Roving Hot Spot That Shares
By JOHANNA JAINCHILL
When the Sunningdale Country Club in Scarsdale, N.Y., opened its
gates last week to a location shoot for "The Sopranos," a new fixture
was on display in the mobile dressing rooms - a roving Wi-Fi hot spot.
With a device called the Junxion Box, the production company can set
up a mobile multiuser Internet connection anywhere it gets cellphone
service. The box, about the size of a shoebox cover, uses a cellular
modem card from a wireless phone carrier to create a Wi-Fi hot spot
that lets dozens of people connect to the Internet.
The staff members of "The Sopranos," squeezed into two trailer
dressing rooms, needed only the Junxion Box and their laptops to
exchange messages and documents with the production offices at
Silvercup Studios in Queens.
"We used to fax everything," said Henry J. Bronchtein, the show's co-
executive producer. "The paper would jam; it was messy. This is much
more reliable."
Junxion Boxes have also been spotted on Google's commuter buses for
employees and along Willie Nelson's latest tour. But what may be a
boon for wandering Web surfers could quickly become a threat to
wireless providers.
"The premise is one person buys an air card and one person uses the
service, not an entire neighborhood," said Jeffrey Nelson, executive
director for corporate communications at Verizon Wireless. "Giving
things away for free doesn't work anymore. It never did."
Unlimited service on cellular modem cards for PC's costs about $80 a
month. The carriers are clearly worried about a technology that could
destroy that business, but they have not formed a united front
against Junxion.
The makers of the Junxion Box, based in Seattle, seem eager to head
off any battle by forming partnerships with the wireless companies.
"We're not trying to build a radar detector," said John Daly, 42, co-
founder of Junxion Inc. and vice president for business development.
"We believe we're creating an opportunity for the carriers. It may
not be entirely comfortable for them right now, but we hope we can
get to a point where we can collaborate with them."
The Junxion Box was created by Mr. Daly and two partners, David
Hsiao, 38, the company's president, and Peter Polson, 31, vice
president for product development. The commercial version of the box
retails for $699. They plan a less expensive consumer version next year.
John Kampfe, director of media and industry analyst relations for
Cingular Wireless, said the Junxion Box was being evaluated and
certified by Cingular and could eventually be sold in conjunction
with Cingular's wireless service for wide-area networks.
"There is a whole pricing model that has to take place with the
Junxion Box," Mr. Kampfe said.
So far Junxion has about 200 customers, many of whom are testing the
product. The company went around the wireless companies by making
Trio Teknologies, a wireless services reseller, its exclusive
distributor.
Peter Schneider, a partner at Gotham Sound, the communications
equipment company in New York that supplied Junxion Boxes to the sets
of both "The Sopranos" and the rapper 50 Cent's upcoming movie, "Get
Rich or Die Tryin'," said his customers would not be interested in
wireless modem cards were it not for the possibility to share the
connection through the Junxion Box.
"That's the exact appeal of it" for his customers, he said. "That you
can rent it to a group. As word gets out, it will become part of the
communication equipment they rent."
But for carriers like Verizon Wireless, which spent $1 billion on its
broadband network, it is difficult to let users piggyback on that
service. "We're not surprised that people are building services like
this and trying to attach them to our network," Mr. Nelson of Verizon
said. "It verifies how cool and how important our network is. We're
going to protect that investment."
That may prove to be an uphill battle as new technologies like
Junxion alter the wireless carriers' control over the use of their
networks.
"That's just something they have got to live with because that's the
technology now," said David Anderson, Willie Nelson's tour manager of
31 years. "Most people wouldn't or couldn't afford to have that many
cards. They weren't going to get 22 customers, but now they got 6."
There are two Junxion Boxes in each of the two tour buses and each
has three wireless modem cards so they can switch to the cellular
provider network with the best local coverage. It allows Mr. Nelson,
whom Mr. Anderson describes as a computer geek, to check his e-mail
and surf the Web while on the road.
"The Junxion Box is good for going down the highway," Mr. Anderson
said from Hillsboro, Tex., where Mr. Nelson was performing earlier
this month. "It was frustrating in the older days. It's finally the
way it should be."
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