You’re the Boss Blog: The Frustrations of Trying to Connect On the Go

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Not so long ago, I could handle being without an Internet connection as long as I could check e-mail and do bare-bones browsing on my cellphone. But now that I keep moving more and more of what I do to the cloud, from accounting to scheduling to collaborating to storing books and documents, I find myself practically incapacitated when I’m cut off from a laptop connection.

In the last year it looked as if the growing availability of free public WiFi connections would save me from having to shell out for a pricey cellular data connection for my laptop — my communications bill is plenty high, thanks, plus those connections are often dicey when you most need them on the road. Starbucks and McDonald’s offer free connections practically anywhere in the world, and other restaurants, cafes and shops are joining in fast. Even better, big airports and many trains, subways and buses are offering free WiFi — and I’m a big fan of public transportation. Most hotels offer free connections, too — although, irritatingly, higher-priced hotels still tend to charge for the privilege.

But the trend to free WiFi has proved too good to be true. These days, I find most free public connections to be barely usable. I recently took Amtrak’s Acela train round-trip between Boston and New York, and in spite of Amtrak’s promotion of the free WiFi on the train, the connection remained so slow for the entire trip that I wasn’t able to do anything useful with it.

Most of the time I couldn’t get any pages to load, and when they did load, it happened so slowly that I never felt the least bit productive. It was worse than useless — if I had known the connection would be so bad, I would have made sure to have plenty to read and would have at least done more relaxing. Instead, I found myself constantly fidgeting with the connection to try to get it to work, falsely encouraged by an occasional burst of success.

The low point was when I tried to buy a ticket on an airline site, and the page timed out trying to load in the middle of the flight-selection process. I got it to slowly reload, thinking I was saving myself the trouble of having to find the same flights, and sure enough the purchase went through. Except it was for the wrong ticket. In reloading the page, I later realized, the site ignored my previous flight choices and just checked off the top option on the page.

I encountered the same sort of worse-than-useless connections in the train station, on the regional train I took a week later, and on the commuter rail train that I took to and from the Amtrak station. And I don’t mean to pick on trains — it’s the same story now at airports and many cafes and shops, too. And it’s not just me. I notice people all around me having the same frustrations. Starbucks still tends to have decent connections — which is probably the main reason it’s nearly impossible to get a seat there these days. That leaves McDonald’s as the last bastion of widely available, free, reliable connections, though most of us don’t relish the idea of spending quality time there.

Our growing need to stay online is the crux of the problem. When companies and public agencies realized a few years ago that they could create good will and customer traffic by offering free WiFi, they offered enough capacity to meet demand. But demand is skyrocketing, thanks to growing reliance on the cloud, and especially to music- and video-streaming services. Worldwide data traffic is up to a billion gigabytes a month, according to networking giant Cisco Systems. That’s about 8 terabytes a second — or 8 million megabytes a second, if you still like to think small, or well more than a quarter of a billion typically sized documents per second. And get this: Cisco estimates demand is growing at a rate of about 40 percent a year.

Let’s hope providers of public WiFi invest in the better connections needed to provide usable service, now and into the future. But I’m not holding my breath. I’ve already bitten the bullet and added “tethering” to my cellphone plan, which means my phone can act as a mobile WiFi hotspot. On my unlimited-data plan, that’s an additional $15 a month, which wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t often provide connections that are only marginally better than the lousy ones otherwise available (and, yes, I have a new, state-of-the-art phone on a 4G network).

If tethering isn’t an option on your phone, you can buy a USB cellular modem that gives you a data connection via one of the cellular carriers. These usually run around $50, plus about $40 a month for a data plan — though again, depending on your carrier and where you are, they don’t always provide fast, reliable connections when you need them most. At least more airlines are offering WiFi on flights, typically at a cost of about $15 a day. I haven’t had much of a chance to play with these yet, and I’m curious to know how good the connections are. Anyone?

I think the bottom line is that those of us who aren’t chained to an office need to be prepared to be connectionless some of the time. To me, that means I’ve avoided going whole hog into the cloud — I still rely on conventional office-type software rather than on cloud-based programs like Google Docs, for example, even though I’d love to switch. One positive trend is the availability of cloud-based tools that keep working when you lose your connection, albeit in more limited form. Google’s Calendar and Gmail services sort of minimally work offline now, and even its Docs service at least lets you look at documents offline. And Zoho offers various cloud-based productivity tools that in some cases are fairly functional offline. Microsoft, meanwhile, offers cloud-based tools that integrate reasonably well with its Office products.

Nevertheless, I now always keep my new Amazon Kindle Fire with me, and make sure it’s loaded with books, documents and videos to help me kill time during those frustrating periods offline. Once in a while I even manage to relax.

You can follow David H. Freedman on Twitter and on Facebook.

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