For the 61 million U.S. residents who still surf the web with a dialup connection, chances are they're still bound to their desks by a phone cord.
Perhaps not for long. Always On Wireless, a company in Houston, doesn't promise to make the dialup net experience any faster, but it does plan to make it wireless.
In response to the proliferation of Wi-Fi hot spots for broadband users, Always On Wireless will unveil a base station at this week's Demomobile conference that lets people plug in their phone lines and receive wireless internet access anywhere within a 100-foot radius.
The WiFlyer ($150), which will initially be sold at WiFlyer.com in October, is a slender, palm-sized box that can be stashed away at home or easily toted in a briefcase for business trips.
It requires no additional setup other than to plug in a phone line and the power supply. People with broadband net access can use the WiFlyer as well, simply by connecting the device with an ethernet cable.
As many as 16 computers can piggyback the phone line, but realistically, "three or four" people can peruse web pages sharing the same phone line with no lag time, said Always On Wireless CEO Rudy Prince.
Prince acknowledged that the dialup user is becoming a dying breed in a burgeoning broadband world. Nonetheless, Prince – the former CEO of eFax.com, which provides software for sending and receiving faxes by e-mail – said dialup users are a significant and underserved group.
"While the penetration rate for Wi-Fi into dialup homes will likely be far less than for broadband, we believe it is still a very legitimate, sizable market that no one has been focusing on before," Prince said.
Sixty-one million residential internet users, or 49 percent of home internet users, still surf the web on dialup lines, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. That number is significantly smaller than the 62 percent of households that retrieved web pages on dialup connections a year ago.
Charles Buchwalter, vice president of analytics for Nielsen/NetRatings, said people are drawn to broadband for its consistent and speedy service. But as long as it remains more expensive than dialup, there will always be dialup users.
"If you can offer dialup more efficiently, faster or more user-friendly, (your product) is probably going to do well," Buchwalter said.
Yankee Group analyst Roberta Wiggins, however, said that dialup users are a diminishing market with "limited opportunity" for vendors.
"It's not a great long-term opportunity, but a great interim opportunity," she said.
Prince admits that other products allow dialup users to receive Wi-Fi, but says they are limited, not portable and difficult for a novice to use.
One such product is Apple Computer's AirPort Extreme Base Station, which includes a port for dialup users. But it costs $200, weighs more than three times as much as WiFlyer and is more complicated to set up.
D-Link, a leading maker of wireless base stations, reportedly supports phone lines on one of its Xtreme G stations. But it requires an additional part – a serial port to be attached to a modem, according to Techdirt, a technology weblog. D-Link does not tout the feature on its website.
The Demomobile conference takes place in La Jolla, California, from Sept. 8-10.
