I’m on vacation until July 1st in the Del-Ray Beach area (I’ll spend some time in South Beach too). Loving it. My inbox will no doubt overflow and bounce a bunch of messages, so if I don’t get back to you, holla back.

This is a very interesting idea. My buddy Mark and I were experimenting with his new Windows Mobile phone which enabled Internet sharing with his laptop via USB. Many phones support this through Bluetooth so you don’t have to take the phone out of your pocket. In both Windows Vista and Mac OSX, the experience of tethering your phone and getting Internet access through it is very simple.

A new feature found on newer smartphones (including mine) is WiFi connectivity. The idea is simple, if the high-speed 3G wireless WAN (WWAN) data connectivity from a cell phone can be accessed through a laptop via wired (USB) or wireless (Bluetooth), also make it available via WiFi, except to multiple concurrent PCs (or devices). This can be achieved by enabling access point (AP) functionality in the phone, or allowing the phone to establish multiple ad-hoc WiFi connections. Putting aside the battery life challenge, processing power in smartphones today can surely handle this functionality, and good software can make the setup experience effortless (like plugging in the USB cable).

This is not a technology problem, but rather a business issue. Like any sustainable business, cellular providers obviously want to maximize their revenue for each asset they own (such as their high-speed data network). As such, they currently limit the software on phones to allow only a single PC to access that network via the phone. Otherwise said, every PC that uses the carrier’s high-speed network has to have an associated contract and data plan.

There is also a capacity planning challenge, but this can be overcome and ultimately comes back to a business decision of whether there’s value diluting an asset’s potential return. Having been a Network Engineer in the past, if you can’t reasonably predict how many hosts will concurrently access a resource, it’s hard to ensure sufficient capacity for a pleasant experience (especially for those customers who have signed the contract and are paying for the service). Simplifying the issue, if there are only 10 contracts for high-speed data access, and 10 devices associated with those contracts, but each of the 10 devices can share access with a bunch more devices, the capacity requirements are much greater and far less predictable. The simple solution to this is to enable the capability in phones, but limit the number of devices that can associate with the phone for shared connectivity. This way, capacity planning is still a static figure, and the same over-provisioning rules apply as before.

Anybody know a provider who is doing this? What do you think? I know I’d like this feature, which will be increasingly probable for automotive scenarios in the coming years.