I was wondering why I was sent to the press conference at the BMW Formula One race track at CES. They were giving the press a guided tour of the pits when I saw that Intel was working with the BMW Formula race team. From the cockpits located in the Intel booth inside the Las Vegas convention center they were driving a remote-controlled WiMAX race car. WiMAX has been touted as a successor to Wi-Fi, its main advantage being tremendous range, in the order of miles instead of feet.

Using WiMAX, live video feeds from the cars were sent to the pit. The big innovation was that the feed was received on notebook PCs equipped to accept WiMAX signals — something not available to consumers yet. If those notebooks are a sign of things to come, this event just might have been worth going to, beyond just checking out cool cars.