I have a dilema with an upcoming demo some employees in my company are going to conduct at a customer site. The problem is that due to security and a web conferencing requirement we must have an internet connection at the site, and using the customer's connection is not likely an option. So the question is, is there any service that exists that can provide short term, or perhaps per-use wireless access? It would need to be available anywhere in the US preferably and support web conference grade connections (eg. webex). More geographically limited options are considerable.
Sure. The problem is who will give you broadband access for a few days? That's the problem the local pornographers also have. They run web cams in the homes of college coeds. After about a week or two, the women usually throw out the pornographers who move on to another bedroom. It makes no sense to order DSL or cable modem broadband at these houses as they want a 12 month commitment and a messy installation.
Wireless to the rescue. Satellite would seem an obvious possibility but that won't work for the pornographers or for your Webex conference systems. The outgoing bandwidth is insufficient and the 700msec minimum latency will kill any attempt to be interactive. Not recommended.
What works for most pornographers are the various wireless ISP's. These often provide symmetrical bandwidth up to 1Mbit/sec. Latency is only a little worse than DSL. When the pornographers need to move to the next bedroom, they just do a site survey test for the WISP coverage and move the dish to the new location.
The problem is "anywhere in the US". I think you might be able to get away with EV-DO of HSDPA via the cellular carriers. We just did a ham radio event on Saturday. The promised internet connection evaporated in a cloud of politics. So, we had two members with Verizon EV-DO cards in laptops that were wired to two different wireless routers. We only got 300Kbits/sec download and 100Kbit/sec upload (lousy location). You can do twice that when the system isn't busy. I didn't check the latency, but it should be fine for conferencing.
If you can negotiate a connection with the local WISP (wireless internet provider), you can probably get much more bandwidth than with cellular. However, there are no national WISP's, so this may turn into a planning problem.
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