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Mobile broadband for laptops starts to click
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Several notebooks due out
Carriers outside the United States have also certified Gobi. Among them: Canada’s Telus, France Telecom’s Orange, Spain’s Telefonica and Britain’s Vodafone, the world’s largest mobile phone network operator.
The Gobi chipset, which is just starting to show up in notebooks on the market, is embedded in the computer. No external devices are needed for a 3G connection, and antennas are located behind the notebook’s display, according to Greg Raleigh, Qualcomm’s vice president of wireless connectivity.
HP was the first to release notebooks with Gobi recently, and Panasonic and Lenovo are now shipping Gobi-enabled laptops, with Dell and Acer to follow suit soon.
“You’re going to see this in a lot of Windows and Linux products,” said Raleigh. Apple, he said, has not yet committed to Gobi.
Notebooks equipped with Gobi “allow you to buy the (3G) feature without concern for which carrier you want to activate your service with,” at the time you make the computer purchase, he said.
“It allows you the freedom of choice later on, if you have a one-year agreement with a carrier and decide you want to go with another carrier a year later, then you’re free to do that because Gobi is technology-independent; it’s agnostic for the carrier technology.
“If you find yourself overseas on business or vacation, before you could not change the carrier without changing the hardware. What this allows you to do is buy the notebook with certainty, knowing that it’s going to work with all carriers in North America and Europe.”
Raleigh said the cost of adding Gobi to a laptop is up to the manufacturer. HP, for example, says it is charging $125 for its “HP Mobile Broadband powered by Gobi” on its EliteBooks.
“A lot of people pay a little bit extra to have a bigger hard drive, or for a better display or for better battery life,” said Raleigh. “And what good is a notebook if it’s not connected?
“This allows you to be connected anywhere. The world becomes your hot spot. We think that’s a pretty darn good feature that people are going to start demanding in all their notebooks.”
Expecting connectivity everywhere
Keith LeFebvre, HP’s vice president and general manager of business notebooks, said Gobi will be added to more of the company’s laptops eventually.
“This is really critical to the way we think that people are going to do mobile computing in the future,” he said. “At some point, you’re going to expect wireless connectivity no matter where you go.”
While the quality of 3G service is “still making progress,” wireless carriers are “getting much, much better in terms of being able to get very high-speed connections all around the country,” LeFebvre said.
Carriers, too, “are getting much more aggressive in terms of what they’re charging for their data rates,” he said. “It’s much more affordable for anybody who is traveling (to use mobile broadband) and who doesn’t want to pay $19.95 a night for a wireless connection from their hotel room.”
Gartner, Inc. vice president Ken Delaney said in a report earlier this year that a technology such as Gobi makes it easier to recommend to businesses considering upgrading to new notebooks that use it.
“Our standing recommendation against embedding wireless Wide Area Network cards in notebooks…has been based on lack of global coverage, high costs and poor asset protection,” he said in the report. “However, new technologies and pricing due by the end of 2008 have the potential to eliminate the problems of embedded, wireless 3G notebook purchases,” he said.
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