Moving lanes on the info superhighway December 18, 2007
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Being Freelance, Internet , 1 comment so farEvery 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.
