BOOT CAMP 545 (07/10/08) – Mobile Broadband, part 1
I
suspect that quite a few of you took a laptop on holiday with you this year,
and if you didn’t you would have certainly been aware of the many who did,
tapping away in airport departure lounges, hotels, bars and cafes. Whilst some
are only too happy to take a well-earned break from their inboxes, there’s a
lot to be said for taking the web with you on your travels.
Not
only will you be able to keep on top of your messages – there are few things
more depressing than returning to a huge stack of unread emails – you’ll be
able to use it to search out local places of interest, book tickets online and
view, save, organise or send your digital photographs to friends and family. If
you still need convincing then how about using Skype’s ‘Dial Out’ feature to
reserve a table in a restaurant or phone the folks back home, for a tiny
fraction of what it costs on a mobile or hotel phone. What’s more, with tiny
and very capable machines now selling for less than £200 (see this week’s Top
Tip), packing a laptop is no longer a burden on the pocket or baggage
allowance.
No
prizes for guessing the subject of the next few episodes of Boot Camp and I
consider myself to be something of a pioneer in the field of mobile data
communications, though for a very long time my efforts were spectacularly
unsuccessful.
Many,
many years ago, long before the web was even a glimmer, let alone a twinkle in
Sir Tim Berner-Lee’s eyes, I made several attempts to exchange simple text
messages with like-minded geeks using portable Ham radio equipment and RTTY
(Radio Teletype) terminals. Occasionally a letter and sometimes a whole word
got through but as a means of reliably exchanging useful amounts of data whilst
on the move it left much to be desired.
It
wasn’t until the late 1980s that I eventually cracked it. Armed with a small
suitcase full of equipment that included a hefty ‘luggable’ PC, a brick-sized
analogue cellphone, a heavily customised acoustic coupler and a dial-up modem I
managed to send a short article to a ‘Bulletin Board’ belonging to a long since
deceased magazine in London, from a hotel room in Birmingham. It was quite an
impressive feat back then but the truth was it would have been a much quicker
and a lot easier to file the copy by carrier pigeon, even so, it was a
tantalising taste of things to come.
In
fact it took rather longer than I had hoped for the technology to mature to the
point where I could trust it and not have to send a backup copy of the file by
post. The digital GSM cellphone system introduced in the mid 90s made life a
little easier, nevertheless, over the years I have wasted countless hours
trying to get laptops to communicate with mobile phones and the Internet, via
cables, infra-red adaptors, Bluetooth devices, wet pieces of string, and a lot
of very flaky software. Even when two-way communications from foreign parts
were established the transfer of data was painfully slow and it produced some
really scary phone bills.
The
first real improvement in the fortunes of laptop users came with the
introduction of Wi-Fi and broadband and it’s worth remembering that these have
only been viable and readily accessible consumer technologies for the past five
or six years.
Mobile
phones have also improved and after the false start and rash promises made by
proponents of the 2.5G system, it has finally started to make sense with 3G
mobile phone networks and HSDPA technology.
Fortunately,
these days all you need to know is that armed with a reasonably recent laptop
with a built-in or plug-in Wi-Fi adaptor you stand a very fair chance of being
able to access your emails, and the Internet, almost anywhere in the civilised
world, which basically means any country with an airport, Holiday Inn,
Starbucks or McDonalds.
That’s
just the start, in a few years we’ll be able to throw off the shackles of
short-range wireless links and surf the web, at quite respectable broadband
speeds, using 3G mobile phone networks. You can already in parts of the UK and
in a growing number of countries around the world. For the moment, though,
mobile broadband ‘roaming’ outside the UK can be a costly business, and stories
of unwary holidaymakers coming home to bills of thousands of pounds are not
uncommon. It is getting cheaper, though but if you can’t wait, over the next
couple of weeks I’ll have some useful hints and tips that can dramatically
reduce the cost of 3G mobile broadband abroad.
There
is also a third way, though I’m only mentioning Internet access via satellite
in passing, as it remains an eye-wateringly expensive technology. Until very
recently you also needed to haul a fair amount of kit around with you, and be
adept at locating communications satellites in geosyncronous orbit, 36,000km
above the Earth. It’s getting easier and compact terminals using Inmarsat’s
BGAN (Broadband Global Area Network) are now available but it will be a very
long time before it becomes a viable option for the average traveller.
Next Week – Mobile Broadband, part 2
JARGON FILTER
ACOUSTIC COUPLER
Basically a microphone and speaker, placed next to the earpiece
and mouthpiece of a telephone, used to send and receive the audible tones from
dial-up modems
BULLETIN BOARD
Pre-Internet communications system and software that allows
computers to connect, upload and download data files over telephone networks
HSDPA
High-Speed Downlink
Packet Access, communications protocol used by 3G mobile phones for data
transfer at speeds of up to 14.4Mbits/second (though currently 1.6 and
3.6Mbit/s speeds are typical)
TOP TIP
In the last nine months a
new generation of ultra low cost mini notebook machines have come onto the
market. The cheapest, so far, at just £99 is the Elonex One, which has a 7-inch
screen, comes with a built-in wireless adaptor and uses the Linux operating
system. It’s fairly basic but adequate for mobile emailing and web surfing. The
Asus Eee PC is where it all began and this range of machines with 7 and 9 and
10.2-inch screens run Windows and Linux; prices for entry level models
currently start at under £150. The latest arrival is the Acer Aspire One,
another Intel based machine with a 9-inch screen, onboard wi-fi, Linux or
Windows and costing less than £200.
Don't forget, there's a
full archive of previous Boot Camp Top Tips at www.pctoptips.co.uk
---end---
© R. Maybury 2008, 1009
Part 2 3 4
|