Voice Box, Data Box

Jaring lent me the equipment needed to test its wireless broadband service from my hotel room in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The customer premises equipment, or, in industry jargon, CPE, is a black box roughly the size and weight of a large paperback book, decorated with the logos of both Jaring and its manufacturer, Soma Networks Inc.

Once the CPE was plugged into a power socket, it took about half a minute for its two orange lights to turn green, signaling that it was on line with its base station and that I was online with the world. The service worked without any further setup, and e-mail and Web pages downloaded to my laptop faster than with the hotel's wired broadband.

I next plugged the hotel's phone into the CPE and called my wife back in the United States. Accustomed to my incessant international calls to test various voice-over-IP services, we had barely said hello before she exclaimed, "You sound great! What are you calling on?"

The CPE is hardly something that you'd throw into a briefcase and commute with, but Soma touts it as a "nomadic" device. That means it can maintain a connection when carried around the living room, as an open laptop can, but not in a moving car or train, as a cellphone can.

I knew just where to go to see how nomadic it was—the Suria shopping mall at the base of the Petronas Twin Towers. At a busy Starbucks there, two different Wi-Fi networks compete for the attention of the many laptop-toting customers. I logged into each in turn and called up Web pages at IEEE Spectrum Online, Yahoo, and Google News.

Then I turned off my Wi-Fi card and plugged in the Soma CPE. A half-minute later, I had my two green lights, and the same Web sites came up at least as quickly as they had with the Wi-Fi connections.

Future versions of the CPE will be a bit more portable than the one I used. Soma has recently contracted with Sanyo Electric, the Japanese consumer electronics maker, for a new version of the device. Soma expects the new box to be both smaller and lighter by the end of the first quarter of 2006.—S.C.