.Dust

This post comes from my per­sonal expe­ri­ence in the last few weeks and even if it may look too much per­sonal I think there are some good points to con­sider while think­ing at the Web 2.0 phe­nom­e­non, at least in Italy.

Last week I spent one week of my hol­i­days in Marina di Pietrasanta, a small city on the sea in Tuscany.

Great place, and great time with my fam­ily and Pic­co­letto (For those who do not know Pic­co­letto, he is my 7 month old child).

We planned to stay there for more than two months and we car­ried bot my Mac­Book and my wife Win­dows box. After set­ting up all the stuff around the new house we turned on our PCs and found that no WiFi con­nec­tiv­ity was avail­able around us.

I was pretty much sure that this was going to hap­pen and because of this I brought with me an UMTS/​HSDPA data card.

Here is the short story of what happened:

• The UMTS/​HSDPA card does not have Mac OSX drivers.
• Since I had with me my wife’s PC with an inte­grated WiFi card I put in place some lit­tle wiz­ardry cre­at­ing a WiFi adHoc net­work and rout­ing all the traf­fic on the WiFi inter­face to the UMTS data card.
• I tried to con­nect with the UMTS data card to the net­work and I dis­cov­ered that I did not have HSDPA (not even UMTS) con­nec­tiv­ity avail­able. The card was roam­ing to the EDGE network.
• Finally hid­den in the cus­tomer care area of my mobile oper­a­tor (btw, the same I work for ) I found the Mac OSX dri­vers to con­nect my Mac­Book Pro to the net­work using the blue­tooth con­nec­tion of my Nokia N73. Nev­er­the­less the sit­u­a­tion did not change since I con­tin­ued to have only EDGE cov­er­age and no UMTS coverage.

I spent the week with my Mac­Book con­nected to the inter­net using my Nokia N73 and a blue­tooth connection.

I had lot of issues:

• When I read my RSS feeds I jump to and from Fire­fox to fol­low some links I find inter­est­ing. This means that I always have at least twelve open tabs at any given time in my browser and it may hap­pen that most of them are videos. No way, with this con­fig­u­ra­tion it did not work.
• I always have my instant mes­sen­ger open (Adium) and Skype. No prob­lem with Adium and lot of prob­lems with Skype. (Dropped calls, voice clip­ping, etc. etc.)
• The sim­ple update of my RSS feed list takes almost one hour at that speed. Yes, I know. There are not many peo­ple with 1300 feeds to catch up with and I use Net­NewsWire as a feed reader.
• I am in the for­tu­nate sit­u­a­tion where I do not pay my phone bills (even if that does not mean that I can abuse) but if I was pay­ing for that the EDGE roam­ing would have been sim­ply to expen­sive for me.
• I could not per­form any kind of upload to flickr, my host­ing provider, etc. Too slow for anything.
• I could not even ssh to any of my hosts due the exces­sive echo response time from the network.
• I could not access lastfm​.com and lis­ten to any stream­ing music from the net.

I felt some­how lost.

I real­ized that many of my social con­nec­tions strictly rely on the avail­abil­ity of a high speed inter­net con­nec­tion and that many of my daily tasks show that depen­dency too.

I can reach some of the peo­ple I know only using Skype or Instant Messenger.

The other con­sid­er­a­tion is that many Web 2.0 appli­ca­tion rely on that too. It is assumed that every user has the avail­abil­ity of a high speed inter­net con­nec­tion. Many web­mas­ters have stopped both­er­ing about the size of what they design. If I look at my own web sites I can see that they are gath­er­ing data from other sites (Jaiku, Twit­ter, del​.icio​.us, flickr, etc. etc.) and I never thought it could be an issue for some users. It is, indeed.

I have a broad­band con­nec­tion bot at home and work and never had any kind of issues like those I have depicted above dur­ing my busi­ness trav­els. The story seems to be dif­fer­ent from the per­cep­tion I had.

WiFi is not wide­spread, ADSL is not too and high speed mobile net­work may prove to be unavail­able for some mobile oper­a­tors in some areas of the country.

Why do I blog this? I think that last week was a sort of real­ity check for me.

Related posts:

1. The Cell Phone Is The New Computer
2. Fight­ing 4 4G
3. What’s in a word? The Busi­ness Card
4. The Evo­lu­tions Of Con­sumer Elec­tron­ics Devices
5. Bat­tery killed the Mobile Inter­net star