About MobileHotspot.com

Thank you for taking some time to check out MobileHotspot.com - here's my quick, 2 minute history lesson on how MobilHotspot.com came about

My name is Chuck, the co-founder of MobileHotspot.com - This idea for this site goes back in Fall of 2002, a website based on an invention more of less.

At the time I was out in my yard working with my clunky old Thinkpad laptop which was literally connected to a 100 foot Cat-5 cable direct to my home router.

Close to ten years ago, Wi-Fi was not all that common, and while I did have a "wireless LAN card", it could not reach to the outside area of my property. Being a kind of tech fiddler, I started to flesh out a solution, something that could be a hotspot-on-the-go, but more so be a  "portable internet hotspot". I sketched out a diagram with a WiFi router that was hooked up to 14 volt Ni-Cad  battery from an old Makita cordless drill, which in turn was hooked up to a  laptop running a Linux NAT router. What name could I give this solution? hmmm...it was more or less a "mobile hotspot", that should do it.... A few weeks later I registered the domain name MobileHotspot.com thinking that maybe there was something to this concept...

Over the next few months with no particular sense of urgency, I went about building an actual functional device that did just that - a portable, fully battery powered hotspot with a radius of over 100 feet - as long as I was not embarrassed carrying a toolbox around, I could actually bring it to the beach.

Mind you, this was the days before even 2G data service, so the data modem on the laptop was not much faster than  50Kbps, I cant even remember who the provider was, but I ended up getting a PCMCIA data modem. It was so cool to actually have a solution that actually "worked".

I eventually replaced the IBM laptop with a tiny Toshiba Libretto laptop (which is even smaller than today's net-books), at packaged every thing into a small plastic Home Depot toolbox, with a voltage meter and on/off switch on the outside. It even had an external antenna for that really cool look, but at the time my PCMCIA net card did not have an antenna port/

At about this time, my youngest daughter was born (May 2003), and needless to say, my plans on commercializing my Frankenputer Mobile Hotspot fell to the wayside.

Fast Forward to 2009. A new device called the MiFi hits the market and the term "mobile hotspot" becomes a part of the tech dictionary. I kind of had the, "Hey, that was my idea!" reaction. Well, I figured billion dollar companies like AT&T and Verizon might have a few more resources behind them anyhow ; )

So I resolved on developing and building-up MobileHotspot.com to feature this new and expanding technology of mobile broadband and mobile hotspots, so I could help my visitors understand the benefits and uses of this cool new devices, especially now since the new 4G LTE wireless hotspot in literally about 850 times faster than my prototype of a decade ago.