Sunday, July 31, 2005
[network] Digital infrastructures on holiday
What is the situation in 2005 of digital infrastructure, away from home, travelling in remote areas? The first question is: do you need it?
No. I am old enough to have travelled in Europe when an intra-Europe phone call home made a serious dent in your holiday budget. Furthermore, I enjoy the meditative quality of being disconnected from my daily business for a few weeks every now and then. Nevertheless, my problem was that the extra storage card for my digital camera had not arrived in time. At the highest resolution I could only store 50-odd pictures. So, halfway through my holiday, I needed to offload some files.
In my luggage were a Fujifilm A303 Finepix camera with a 64 Mbyte xD card, an Ipaq with an additional 256 MByte SD card, and a SonyEricsson GSM phone with no separate storage card. The Ipaq and the phone have BlueTooth. I also have a USB drive with 64 Mbyte. Using the Ipaq storage is not possible: the cards are incompatible, and there is no connectivity between them,. Besides, the storage card was stuffed with MP3’s and e-books. I might have used GPRS with the phone but again, there is no connectivity: the camera does not have infrared or BlueTooth. In addition, at current GPRS rates of more than € 1 per Mbyte, it is both cheaper and faster to buy an additional 256 Mbyte xD card, even at the inflated price of € 75 that I was quoted near the tower of Pisa. So, I went to an Internet café in Volterra that offered data transfer services. They actually had a multi card reader, and I could upload at the speed of 2 pictures per minute. The entire exercise set me back € 2.50. As a hosting service I used streamload.com, with which I have begun to be very happy. Uploading is through a Java applet, and there is no storage limit. I wrote about it in another article.
Internet points are popping up everywhere, and I have seen two at campsites, see the following pictures.
They can be very limited in functionality, so that I would not be able to transfer pictures. It is remarkable to see that ADSL is actually working in rural areas, because the available bandwidth reduces with distance. So will the future be like whatthehack.org, where tents have 100 Mbit/sec Internet connections (see also on flickr)?
No. I am old enough to have travelled in Europe when an intra-Europe phone call home made a serious dent in your holiday budget. Furthermore, I enjoy the meditative quality of being disconnected from my daily business for a few weeks every now and then. Nevertheless, my problem was that the extra storage card for my digital camera had not arrived in time. At the highest resolution I could only store 50-odd pictures. So, halfway through my holiday, I needed to offload some files.
In my luggage were a Fujifilm A303 Finepix camera with a 64 Mbyte xD card, an Ipaq with an additional 256 MByte SD card, and a SonyEricsson GSM phone with no separate storage card. The Ipaq and the phone have BlueTooth. I also have a USB drive with 64 Mbyte. Using the Ipaq storage is not possible: the cards are incompatible, and there is no connectivity between them,. Besides, the storage card was stuffed with MP3’s and e-books. I might have used GPRS with the phone but again, there is no connectivity: the camera does not have infrared or BlueTooth. In addition, at current GPRS rates of more than € 1 per Mbyte, it is both cheaper and faster to buy an additional 256 Mbyte xD card, even at the inflated price of € 75 that I was quoted near the tower of Pisa. So, I went to an Internet café in Volterra that offered data transfer services. They actually had a multi card reader, and I could upload at the speed of 2 pictures per minute. The entire exercise set me back € 2.50. As a hosting service I used streamload.com, with which I have begun to be very happy. Uploading is through a Java applet, and there is no storage limit. I wrote about it in another article.
Internet points are popping up everywhere, and I have seen two at campsites, see the following pictures.
They can be very limited in functionality, so that I would not be able to transfer pictures. It is remarkable to see that ADSL is actually working in rural areas, because the available bandwidth reduces with distance. So will the future be like whatthehack.org, where tents have 100 Mbit/sec Internet connections (see also on flickr)?
