I have a fragile relationship with technology – having been born too soon to be described as part of the internet generation – but that doesn’t mean I’m not just a little bit in love with it! Possibly my favourite techie piece of equipment is small, slim-line, black and just downright cool. Mobile broadband – what’s not to love?
Big Trouble – Landline Provision
Not mentioning any names here, but I used to work for one of the larger providers of phone and internet services in the country. My relationship with them now is limited to their (somewhat variable) provision of a landline connection. Thanks to the ageing copper wires and the six miles distant exchange that this connection involves it doesn’t provide the best speeds in the world when it comes to broadband. I can just about stream radio – on a good day – but there’s no chance of getting through a full episode of Eastenders without a message popping up to tell me I’m trying to achieve the impossible. Speeds seem to average about 0.5 Mb, and that’s when it’s not rained heavily. To be fair to said massive corporation, when things do go wrong they send out a wet and frustrated engineer to mess around in the fields all day and get things back up to speed, sort of.
Did Last Century Really Happen?
During one particularly disastrous broadband outage, about a year ago, I took the plunge and bought myself a mobile broadband Wi-Fi set up. I knew the signal was certainly “OK” in the area, despite a lot of the odds being against that fact. However, I wasn’t prepared for the joys of mobile broadband. Compared to my fixed line (and accounting for the fact that there’s no mobile mast within four miles), I couldn’t be happier. I regularly get 2-3 Mb and can comfortably watch as much catch up TV as I like. The router is small, perfectly formed, and has to sit in a window, which gives it a nice view of the distant mast. Mobile and Wi-Fi ended those distant days of the archaic dial-up modem I owned, last century, that seems like a long forgotten nightmare.
Home Work and Troublesome Relatives
The real beauty of course is that it can travel with me wherever I like. This makes life a lot easier in terms of being able to work when and where necessary. In addition to working from home I also have to work from the homes of a couple of elderly (and troublesome) relatives, who believe that the internet is probably the work of the devil and won’t give it houseroom. Having access to mobile broadband when and where needed makes a huge difference in my working life and allows more flexibility that I’ve previously believed possible.
Mobile broadband and 3G networks provided by www.nucleusnetworks.co.uk/ make life easier (or is that possible) for a range of professionals in industries that truly need to be on the go.