Mobile WiFi router in a box – Sprint mobile broadband card powers iBox2Go mobile router
By Will Park on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 3:36 PM PST In Accessories, Announcements, Services, Sprint
We love the idea of sharing your mobile broadband connection with more than one device. The only other solution along that line of thought was the WMWifiRouter application that turns your WiFi-enabled 3G WinMo smartphone into a wireless broadband router. With WMWifiRouter, you can share your data connection with multiple WiFi-enabled devices – an elegant solution indeed.
A not-so-elegant option comes to us in a mini-attache case that includes everything to you need to share your Sprint (NYSE: S) mobile broadband card’s data connection with up to 10 other devices. iBox2Go is basically a mobile WiFi router that uses Sprint’s Novatel U727 EVDO Mobile Broadband USB card to provide on-the-go access to wireless data. There are other wireless routers that work with mobile broadband cards, but iBox2Go offers a convenient ready-for-the-road package.
iBox2Go is offered in three trim levels – iB300 is $200 and works out to 40-feet, the iB100 costs $250 and offers a 50-foot range, the iB500 runs $350 and projects a signal out to 200-feet. The bottom-end iB100 rocks a single Ethernet port and only works with a USB card; the mid-range iB300 adds a PCMCIA card slot; and the iB500 adds ExpressCard goodness, 802.11n WiFi, and three additional Ethernet jacks. Of course, the cost of an iBox2Go doesn’t include the monthly payment on your Sprint wireless data plan.
Sprint’s mobile broadband offerings discourage the sharing of a wireless data plan by assigning each account to a single piece of hardware. If you want to go wireless with multiple devices, Sprint would have you pay for an additional mobile broadband account. With iBox2Go you could get multiple devices, and people, online while on the road – with just a single wireless data plan.
Wanna see it in action? Here’s a vid.
[Via: ComputerWorld]
