Moving lanes on the info superhighway December 18, 2007
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Being Freelance,Internet , trackbackEvery now and again, I find myself looking back on over twenty years working in information technology, and am truly amazed at how far we’ve come. When I started working, 300 baud (about 300 bits per second, or less than 40 characters per second) was still very common. Only geeks had home computers, and even as a programmer, I didn’t have a terminal on my desk. One of my early projects was to buy the first PCs for the NZ Ministry of Transport’s head office.
And today, I sit in Cafe Nero on Parkway in Camden, patched into the net using a mobile phone modem, happily surfing away at speeds which would have been very good for home use only a couple of years ago. Its all over the 3G mobile phone network, and might just put the overpriced cafe-based wifi services out of business. For £20 per month, I have enough bandwidth and download capacity to do everything I normally do, except perhaps my recent addiction to watching the BBC online. Its also great insurance if the broadband at home disappears – something which seems more common now that Virgin have taken over Telewest / NTL.
In the last few weeks, I’ve been working much more flexibly, based between home, a client’s offices and a supplier’s. It’s insurance if my broadband goes down and means I don’t need to rely on client’s or supplier’s to give me access to their networks. Most of my work is online now – project team collaboration sites, email and other tools – so to be disconnected for any length of time is difficult.
I decided to use TMobile for this, despite a very similar offering from Vodafone, who have my mobile contract. It was the difference made by a salesperson who talked sense and didn’t try to tell me that having a maximum download of 3Gb per month was the same as unlimited surfing. Yes, 3Gb is a lot, but infinity is more. That maths degree comes in handy sometimes, it really does.
Now, if someone could just invent a way of charging the laptop over the mobile network. The nice people here are going to get tired of me nicking their power.
Comments»
Hi Camden Kiwi, it’s your old pal from Leadenhall market again. I got a Macbook Pro and a vodafone 3G modem recently. It is the definition of freedom in the workplace, no longer tied to a desk and I’m enjoying learning OS X. I’m finding 3 Gb a month to be fine, I use bluetooth for big file transfers from my home pc. There’s going to be a two tier worker population soon I think, those with wireless and those with a ball and chain…….