New Services Beta Program

Most folks know Autonet Mobile as the company that provides reliable Internet connectivity to cars in motion. Starting now, we're beginning to open the curtains a bit and reveal more about where we are headed. One question we sometimes get is "Why do I need Internet in the car?". If you think of the Internet from only a browser perspective, that's a really good question. We think of the Internet as much more than that. Beginning this month, we're going to be letting some of our customers try out some of our new services as part of our beta program.

We're going to start with 2 new location based services. "Geo Fence" and "Find My Car".

Geo Fence

With a Geo Fence, you can define a virtual geographical area to make sure vehicles follow approved routes. If a designated boundary is crossed, you'll receive a notification with a time, date and location stamp. Reverse GeoFences also can be configured to alert you to vehicles that enter an area you designate as restricted. You can set up multiple fences with different activation times. Plus you can set yourself up to be notified via a Text message to your cell phone or by email.

Find My Car

With "Find My Car", you'll always be able to see where your car is. No need to call the police or pay expensive fees to a tracking service. Just go to our secure and convenient web site and see where it is. It can easily be hidden so a car thief doesn't know to disable it. While this is great for finding a stolen car, I think it's actually going to be more useful for finding your car in the mall or airport parking lot.

If you're interested in being part of our beta program just send us an email to beta@autonetmobile.com . We're only doing the Beta program with the CarFi branded routers, so not everyone will be able to participate. If you're not sure which version you have give our support team a call at 1-800-977-2107 or if you look at the top of you're router it'll have 2 USB ports on it if it's a CarFi model.

We're not ready to announce the price for these new features are going to be yet, but you can be sure that it's going to be very reasonable and blow away competing solutions out there. We're able to do this because the router was built with features like these in mind and we don't have to require you to buy a whole new system.

These are just the first of many new applications that are coming and I wish I could mention them all now, but our marketing folks would have a fit. Look for some really cool applications focused around music and video in the car coming soon. Now that we've got a reliable Internet link in the car, we've got a lot of ideas on how folks can use it. I'd love to hear your ideas too, so please send them on.

Posted at 05:12PM Nov 30, 2009 by dmoeller in Doug Moeller  | 

Autonet's TRU Technology explained

One of the big differentiators between our product and other products is something we call our "TRU Technology", so I thought I'd explain a bit about what that is and the reasoning behind it. When we first started developing our In-Car router we essentially developed a product very similar to some of the other WiFi routers that are now on the market. They are basically just a cellular data card like you use in a laptop plugged into a WiFi router like what you might have at your home or office. And what we found was that though that product worked OK for fixed or nomadic applications, it didn't work well in a moving vehicle. And that's when the real innovation started here at Autonet Mobile since we really saw the need for reliable connectivity in the automotive market and it was clear that it was not going to be solvable with a box only solution. After a lot of research and experimentation we learned what the issues were and how to solve them. And we came to realize that it was going to be necessary for us to not only build the In-Car router, but we also had to be an Internet Service Provider and run our own Network Operations Center. These things all have to work in tandem to provide the best possible solution These are four basic cornerstones of our "TRU Technology". I'll explain each one a bit and try not to get too techie with it.

1. TRU Link Management
2. TRU Session Management
3. TRU Network Management
4. TRU Content Management

TRU Link Management

If you've ever used a cellular data card in your laptop then you're familiar with the experience of having long (several seconds) connect times, long re-connect times, having to bring up some application and stopping/starting the connection or even having to unplug the card and replug it in when it stops working. Basically, what we do is have an agent running on our In-Car router that re-establishes the connection for you. And we do it in milli-seconds so you don't even experience a dropped connection. No need to install any special software or drivers and no need to be a networking expert to get it going. Our TRU Agent automatically detects when it needs to make a new connection or when a connection has stalled and it will do it without the user having to do anything.

TRU Session Management

This is where I'm going to get a little bit techie. The Internet is based upon the TCP/IP protocol (check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Protocol_Suite for more detail then you ever cared to know about it) and it's really not the ideal protocol for the wireless world, but it's too late to change the Internet so we're stuck with it. When TCP/IP was first being developed everything was being run over modems with speeds of 1200 or 2400 baud. That's 1.2 Kbps and 2.4 Kbps, so you can imagine how slow and busy the network was. The architects of TCP/IP understood this well and they knew that network congestion was a big problem, so they designed TCP so that if a network message didn't make it to it's destination it would slow down how fast it was sending. They assumed (correctly at the time) that the reason a network message didn't make it to it's destination was because the network was too busy and they should force the sender to slow down.

Now, fast forward to today where our wireless network is running at speeds of 800 Kbbs to 2000 Kbps and we're still using the same protocols. In the wireless world when a network message doesn't make it to it's destination it's almost always because of a loss of a wireless signal. Could be due to bad coverage, wireless interferance, an obstruction, or whatever. It's almost never network congestion, so forcing the sender to slow down how fast they are sending doesn't help the problem at all and it only makes the applications run slower then they are capable of running.

Our session management technology fixes this by taking over the management of the TCP session from the users device. We're able to adjust the TCP parameters and timers on the cellular network without changing the settings on the users wireless device. This allows the user to use the same wireless device that they use in the home or office without having to install special software or device drivers.

TRU Network Management

This is probably the most important, but least flashy part of our technology. Our Director of Engineering Ron Pashby, and myself have a long history of working with new technologies and then figuring out how to effectively manage them and then scale them so that they were actually useful to users. In our past careers we would often come across new technologies that were really cool, but impractical to deploy because of the lack of consideration for management and scalability. In the In-Car router we have an agent that is constantly monitoring a number of things such as signal strength, packet loss, latency and speeds. The In-Car router can then automatically make adjustments to improve the user experience without the user having to do anything. The really cool thing is that the router can do all of this by itself without having to depend on the network to do it. And it reports all of this back to our Network Operations Center where our support folks can access it and help you if you ever call. Those low end routers you see out on the market now just can't do that because they don't have the CPU horsepower, our technology or a Network Operations Center that can actually manage the devices in the field.

TRU Content Management

This is an area that you probably haven't heard much about yet, but you will. Our In-Car Router not only supports reliable wireless connectivity, but it's also a platform that can support hosted applications and content. We have the ability to push content to your car from your home or the Internet at large. We'll be releasing a number of new applications and services this year that take advantage of this, so you'll have to stay tuned to get more details on those. The good thing is that the hardware platform we sell today is capable of supporting these already so you don't have to worry about obsolete hardware. Since we operate the network, we can easily do software updates over the air so you don't have to mess with doing it yourself.

Posted at 03:09PM Aug 08, 2009 by dmoeller in Doug Moeller  | 

The beginnings of Autonet

Sometimes folks ask about how Sterling and I started Autonet Mobile, so I thought I’d share a bit of that history.

Back in 1998, while I was working at Bay Networks we acquired a wireless LAN company called NetWave. NetWave was one of the first companies to build a full product suite that implemented the new IEEE 802.11 standards and I was really interested in getting my hands on it. I had “played” with some pre-standards stuff before like the Karlbridge, but the NetWave solutions had the potential to be much more main stream. (At the time, the PCMCIA cards were $500 each, and the Access Point was $1500, but that was still a big improvement over the proprietary solutions that were out there before). So, though my job was really focused around IP routing protocols I managed to get a bunch of the NetWave stuff in the name of verifying their interoperability with our other products.

Having recently gotten a new car, my first task was putting in a killer new sound system. And being a diligent and constant ripper of my CD’s to mp3’s I really wanted to figure out how to get all that music in my car and keep it updated. So, it didn’t me long to figure out that I needed a computer in my car that had wireless capabilities in it so that it could to my home music collection. At this point, cellular data networks weren’t around, so I was just focused around doing the wireless sync while the car was in the garage.

I took a Standard ATX 486 motherboard, found a 12VDC power supply from a marine computer supplier, bought an IDE to PCMCIA adapter for the Netwave card, added a couple of HUGE 80GB drives; I found a really cool 8” VGA touchscreen that was surplus from some medical equipment, built a Plexiglas enclosure and a shutdown controller and installed it in my car. The part that was hardest to find, was a decent head unit that Aux-In capabilities for the audio, but I finally found a Blaupunkt unit that worked great.

Software wise I had to make some major compromises. I wanted it to be Unix, but there were just not any decent graphical music players for Unix so I ended up going with Windows 98, using Winamp as the music player and rsync to copy the music over. I eventually got around to adding a GPS, an OBD2 interface and video support. It was a great system and great learning process. I still have it somewhere in my garage.

So, fast forward a few years and a few startups and I’m working at a new startup that is looking at providing Satellite based connectivity to command center type vehicles. I’m really focused on developing the network and the CPE device and other folks are developing the antennas technology. I get way ahead of them in the development cycle and I look towards using these new cellular data cards in my system for testing purposes. And they were horrible! They worked OK in the test lab, but in actual vehicles they were worthless. So, I dropped that and that company soon imploded for other reasons anyway.

Sterling was working at that same company and he was always really interested in taking Internet connectivity to the mass automotive market. The Satellite stuff we were doing was cool, but it would never be economical enough and the antenna size would always be an issue. After we had both left that company he contacted me to see what it would take to make a cellular based solution work for real. I dove hard into for about 6 months and really came to understand the challenges of using TCP in a mobile wireless environment. It would have been so easy and elegant to solve these problems with a new protocol, but we knew that wasn’t feasible. There was just no way we’d ever be able to get every Operating System vendor, every router vendor and every cellular carrier to implement it so we had to come up with a solution that was completely transparent to the existing network infrastructure. And that’s where our TRU technology comes into play. I’ll explain our TRU Technology in detail in an upcoming post, but that’s what really makes us different then every one else.

So, after we came up with the TRU Technology, we implemented the first generation of it, built up 10 units and we started field-testing. That’s where we learned that we really had solved a problem that most people didn’t even realize existed. People we’re used to “dropped call” syndrome on their cell phones and they expected the data network to perform just as poorly. Next, we had to start a real company so that we could build lots of these and really establish this market. I’ll spare you the details of the joys of fund raising and venture capital, but we did it and now we’ve really established a new market.

One funny note is that we’re getting ready to release a home sync product, which is eerily close in function to that original Car PC I built in 1998. I still just want my mp3’s in my car more then anything :-)

Posted at 09:44PM Jun 28, 2009 by dmoeller in Doug Moeller  | 

4G: LTE vs. WiMax

One question that I seem to get pretty often is. Is Autonet going to support 4G?

We will of course, but it's really a more complicated question then that. 4G is really a generic term for the next generation OFDM networks that are being deployed and doesn't refer to any particular technology. Generally there are 2 types of 4G being developed, WiMax and LTE.

WiMax is the one that gets all the hype here in the U.S. and is broadly being marketed by the likes of Sprint/Clearpoint and Intel. Every CES for the past 10 years we've been hearing about WiMax and how it's just around the corner. I tell ya, nothings more frustrating for me then seeing a great technology get over-hyped and exploited. It confuses the market to no end.

LTE is the 4G technology that the GSM world is embracing. While it wasn't developed in the same open manner that WiMax was, it's really a cleaner evolution of the technology. Though we all know well that having good technology is only one piece of the equation. WiMax has the head start as far as deployments in the U.S. with some deployments out there now and I don't expect we'll see any LTE deployments in the U.S. till 2012.

For us here at Autonet, the technical merits of each are really a moot point. What really matters most to us is coverage. When your in a vehicle you're always going to be moving between cities and maintaining that connectivity is going to be more important to you then which network you're hooked up to. That's one of the reasons that our current product connects to three different networks (1xRTT, EVDO-0, EVDO-A). We know that between these networks, that the odds are really good that you're going to have connectivity to some network. When there is a fast network available we'll connect to it, but if not we'll connect to a slower network and at least keep you connected. It might not be as fast when you're out in the sticks, but it'll still work.

So, who's going to win? It looks like the rest of the world is going to adopt LTE and here in the U.S., we're going to have both LTE and WiMax. At first glance you might think that this is good since it means you'll have a choice, but in reality it actually means that you'll have fewer choices. The equipment you buy is going to support one or other (too expensive to support both), so that means you'd have to buy new equipment to switch network providers. And the providers know this very well. That's why you see some of them spends lot's of money on customer acquisition and less on servicing existing customers.

So, my answer to the original questions is, Who cares? They are both so far off in the future that anything you buy now is going to be obsolete by then regardless.

Posted at 03:43PM May 05, 2009 by dmoeller in Doug Moeller  |