On the HD Set: Remote Productions Leverage the Roving Hot Spot

When the Sunningdale Country Club in Scarsdale, NY, welcomed the crew of The Sopranos for a location shoot this summer, a quiet revolution was taking place in the mobile dressing rooms outside. For the first time, The Sopranos had created a roving Wi-Fi hot spot for its company.

With a new device called the Junxion Box, any production company can set up a mobile multi-user Internet connection anywhere it gets cell phone service. The box, about the size of a shoebox cover, uses a cellular modem card from a wireless phone carrier to create a wi-fi hot spot that lets dozens of people connect to the Internet.

Junxion Boxes, according to The New York Times, have also been spotted on Google’s commuter buses for employees and on Willie Nelson’s latest tour. “The Junxion Box is good for going down the highway,” said David Anderson, Willie Nelson’s tour manager of 31 years. Noting that Nelson is “a computer geek” who likes to surf the web and check his email while on the road, Anderson said “it was frustrating in the older days. It’s finally the way it should be.”

The commercial version of the Junxion Box retails for $699. So far, the company (www.junxion.com) has about 200 customers, many of whom are testing the product. Considered a hot prospect for local production crews, the box is being used on the rapper 50 Cent’s upcoming movie, Get Rich or Die Tryin’.

So far there’s been no official position on bandwidth-sharing from the phone companies who supply the broadband service used by the Junxion Box. Cingular said it was evaluating the box, while Verizon recently lowered the price of its wireless service from $80 to $60 a month.