Category: Wireless & Apps

“It’s the firmware (and customer support), stupid!”  That’s the lesson I learned when I bought an $75 EnGenius EOC-2610
high-power WiFi system in December, 2008 (when I was staying in NYC, cadging Internet from neighbors).  I got far enough into its dense menu systems to see some good hot spots, but I never got the damn thing to actually connect.  And at first my hubris was such that I simultaneously took to task a small company called Great Boat Gear for selling a “marine” version of the same hardware at more than double the cost.  Well, my bad…

So how about a product whose details are mysterious and which may not exist, and even if it does, probably doesn’t work very well? The thing is that I’ve gotten a little Bluetooth happy, and the Deckband 4i concept looks like a particulary interesting way to use it on a boat…

Type my zip code into the Sprint coverage map and you’ll get the above. The green color indicates some level of service, but the little dots mean “Signal strength information unavailable.” Well, when…