Internet Access

I rarely use my cellphone for internet access, primarily because very few sites are mobile ready (Yahoo! and Amazon are exceptions). An upstart group led by Neil Edwards, ex-VP at Verisign’s Network Solutions wants to change all that. They will soon start to promote a new ‘.mobi’ internet address suffix that was recently approved by ICANN (Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers). They will require registrants to agree to the new domain’s accessibility standards, which means most Web sites will need to rebuild their sites from the top down to make sure their web pages load faster and are easier to read on mobile phones.

While good intentioned, I have my doubts that this standard will catch on. There is nothing like the cache of having ‘.com’ after your address. If companies want to get a piece of the growing mobile data marketplace (soaring to $8.3 billion last year), I suggest they set up redirection commands on their site that can automatically send phone surfers to a lo-fi version (similar to Time Warner’s AOL.com).
Of course Nokia, Vodafone and Verizon are said to be backers of the new standard.

Few know that a blackberry can be used as an external modem for a PC. If set up properly, your laptop can have full Internet access anywhere your blackberry does. The specifics of the technique are posted at the blackberry forums.

Phil Bogle at Jobster tried it and got it working fine. He reports that “no one would mistake GPRS for broadband, but the connection is fine for emailing, blogging, and light web browsing.”

Jeff Jarvis conqueror of brands everywhere threw some love Connexion’s way, commenting that he didn’t think Connexion’s new price structure was a bargain, “but what the hell?”

I agree with Jarvis, $26 bucks isn’t all that much when you’re talking about 24 hours of Internet access from the cabin of an airplane. It’s less than dinner and a movie, and really worth the cost during those cramped-up flights. Just the novelty alone would be worth it for me.

UPDATE: 1/13/06 8:30 I was reminded by a reader that when I throw Connexion some love of my own, I should mention that this blog is sponsored by Connexion. That does not mean, however that my love for them is any less genuine. I cannot wait to be on a flight with Internet access.

The World Travel Awards was conceived in 1993 to acknowledge and celebrate excellence in the world’s travel and tourism industry. This division of the World Travel Group surveys thousands of travel professionals for their rating of industry providers and has announced the winners for 2005.

Connexion was the recipient of the World Travel Award for World’s Leading High-Speed In-flight Internet Services for the third year running.

Cathay Pacific won again, and in the past was selected for innovations such as their notifly service which uses SMS messaging technology to provide passengers real-time updates about their travel itinerary.

My dad likes to say that unexpected travel plans are dancing lessons from God. On this trip to visit my fiancé and celebrate his twenty-third birthday in Florida, I learned that the same statement extends to Internet access when working from the road. From spotty hotel Ethernet connections to the absence of any reliable WiFi in the greater Palm Beach area - technology can sometimes fail you.

I got into Melbourne, Florida after a very long night. The new sleeping pill my mother gave me for the flight didn’t do a thing. I didn’t crash and burn until just before landing in Atlanta. I had to be awakened by the flight attendant after all the other passengers had deplaned. I was so jet lagged and disoriented by the time my connection to Melbourne landed that I didn’t have the strength to plug in my laptop.

After saying hello to my fiancé and sleeping through most of the afternoon - I woke up refreshed and ready to blog about the uselessness of sleeping pills for red eye flights. But I couldn’t get Andy’s Internet connection to work on my computer. He insisted that Comcast doesn’t work with Macs, which I found patently ridiculous.

I found myself more apt to agree with him after struggling with Comcast’s installation CD for a very frustrating half-hour. Comcast works fine at my parents’ house in Seattle, where everyone is a Mac addict. But I reasoned that maybe Comcast in Florida is different from Comcast in Seattle. Not really true - but I was out of ideas.

We went in search of a coffee house with a WiFi connection. I really needed to post and check my work e-mail. We found the one place within driving distance of Vero Beach that had WiFi only to discover that it was incomprehensibly incompatible with some facet of my company’s e-mail setup. Not only was I unable to check my e-mail, but I couldn’t log into Movable Type. The woman at the coffee house apologized profusely but said that their tech guy was out sick and she was stumped. We left with free chai, but without an Internet connection.

Eventually, I managed to get Andy’s Airport Express base station up and running off his Comcast modem - something that he, a computer science teacher, had previously been unable to do. He claimed that he’d just been too lazy to figure it out, but I was very proud of myself and became insufferably smug. It’s OK, because he thinks I’m cute when I’m smug - but that’s another story.

I spent a lovely, relaxing few days with Andy - catching up and playing on the beach. This was interspersed with e-mail checking and some blogging. Then it was time to say goodbye. I packed my bags and he took me to Melbourne. I flew to Atlanta, which is - as it turns out - the single busiest airport in the United States. Flights out of Atlanta are constantly full if not overbooked - which was the case with my return flight to Seattle.

Booted from my flight - I went through the endless process of changing my ticket, getting my hotel and meal vouchers, and negotiating a free domestic flight with the friendly folks at Delta. The woman at the next counter had also been booted from our flight, but she decided to pitch a fit. I doubt if she was treated as nicely as I.

I was planning to blog about how being nice to gate agents tends to get you a better compensation package when unexpected travel plans strike. But when I got to my Delta-subsidized hotel I found that I had no WiFi and an Ethernet connection that sputtered out every 10 seconds. I resigned myself to another night without the Internet and went to bed.

As I write this - the flight attendant informs me that our Boeing 767 is somewhere over Eastern Montana. No, I’m not actually blogging from the plane. Connexion isn’t domestic yet, though I wish it were. I’m writing what I will blog when my precious laptop is once again connected. It’s almost like the Internet - but not quite. Ooh, I can’t wait until Connexion goes domestic!

While traveling, you sometimes have to jump through way more hoops than you expected. Whether it’s to get yourself a decent Internet connection or a flight home. Keeping your wits and your sense of adventure about you are always the keys to survival. Yes, air travel is uncomfortable and exhausting - but you only need to look at the innovations of the past century to realize just how good we have it. People used to have to cross the country in covered wagons. We do it in Boeing 767’s.

Now if only we could get an Internet connection.

Here I am at beautiful Sea-Tac International Airport getting ready to board a red eye Delta flight to Atlanta. Since Connexion isn’t yet on domestic flights, I will have to do without the Web for five whole hours.

“Lucky it’s a red eye,” I begin to tell myself. “I can sleep the whole way. I probably won’t even notice the lack of access. I can quit any time I want.”

That’s the denial talking. It’s one of the first signs you’re an addict. And these days, it’s harder than ever to be addicted to the Web.

Until Connexion came along and showed me that Internet access on an airplane is possible, I believed that the Web was one of those things you had to do without when traveling. Yes, it was a hardship. Yes, I felt myself beginning to get jittery after my iPod and laptop batteries died. Yes, I started my search for the nearest Ethernet port the second the plane’s wheels hit tarmac. But I somehow I managed to cope with my temporary loss of connection.

Now it’s a whole other story. And as I prepare to take my first flight since I became aware of the wonders of midair WiFi, I’m not sure how I’ll deal.

At the risk of pegging myself as a huge Trekkie to the entire blogosphere, I can say that this whole experience has given me deeper insight into the plight of Seven of Nine - the buxom Borg from Star Trek: Voyager.

For the sake of you non-Trekkies out there, I’ll explain briefly. The Borg are a collective consciousness of humanoid cyborgs. They travel the galaxy assimilating new alien races in a never-ending search for perfection. And after being separated from the Borg collective consciousness, Seven experienced feelings of anxiety, pain, loneliness, rage and a general sense of foreboding. It’s a common symptom that all Borg experience when severed from the hive mind.

Maybe, like Seven, I’ve been assimilated into the great collective consciousness that we call the Web. After all, I’m here uploading the contents of my brain for the entire blogosphere to see. You can read my mind, archive my thoughts, download my memories. Long after I am gone, it is likely that my postings will linger on somewhere in the electronic universe.

Of course the Web is made by an ever-growing group of individual humans - most of whom have good intentions. The Borg, on the other hand, are evil. They destroy and assimilate everything in their path. I’m not really a drone. But I do have one very important thing in common with them. Like any good Borg, I’m very happy to be in the collective.

It used to be that you’d just have to suffer through Web withdrawals if you were out of WiFi range.

Enter Skweezer - which takes any web page and “skweezes” it down to a format that’s more suitable for your ultra-slick mobile phone or PDA. It’s US$14.99 per year for a service that doesn’t include ads.

It ain’t perfect though. Calcanis, and a bunch of other bloggers got rightfully hacked off at Skweezer for snagging RSS feeds, ripping out ads, and adding their own - essentially hijacking content to “skweeze” out profits.

Said Darren Rowe of ProBlogger:

Basically they are repackaging content of sites/blogs for viewing on PDAs and Phones. Not a bad idea in many respects - however they are taking complete posts and giving no real link backs. They are also stripping the advertisements from the sites also.

About the only thing that I can see on their version of my site that is linked directly back to and hosted on my site is the images. So not only are they using my content without giving me a way to benefit from what they are doing - but I’m also hosting their images.

This does not seem a fair deal to me.

The other thing that concerns me about this approach is that now there are two pages with almost identical content for each page on my site - there is duplicate content. Google does not look favorably upon duplicate content - it downgrades the ranking of sites that use it and I suspect that this practice will (and already has) downgraded the ranking of blogs that are duplicated in this way.

On the other side of the argument, Techdirt argues:

They’re not profiting off the content of others (if they’re profiting at all). They’re profiting off of the ability to provide a useful service that makes your content more valuable to the end users. Why aren’t these same people freaking out that Google indexes their site, makes it findable and (gasp! oh no!) puts text ads along the results page? If you hadn’t figured it out by now, the name of the game is providing what your customers or readers want or they’ll just go elsewhere. If a site won’t let me view the content in the best way for me, then why should I bother visiting it at all?

This all goes back to what I like to call the “who moved my cheese?” effect - which is when people are resistant to change for entirely legitimate reasons. Change is scary for companies just like it is for individuals. And the neverending pace of technology - from WiFi at 30,000 feet to the whole Web 2.0 thing - is one constant change. Industries from public relations to entertainment are feeling the “squeeze.” And their reaction - while understandable - does nothing to solve the problem.

For example: I tend to get irritated with the entertainment industry when they say that I’m “stealing” .mp3s or television shows off the Internet when they make no effort to make those shows and songs readily available for legal download. If I can’t find music on the iTunes store, I feel entirely justified in LimeWiring it. But the minute that ABC started putting Desperate Housewives up there, I stopped grabbing it off Bittorrent. I’d really rather pay - honestly.

Yes, it takes time to catch up with the pace of change. But given the “who moved my cheese?” effect, nobody would ever catch up at all if it weren’t for the folks out there “stealing.” And just when they finally catch up, something else will happen to ruffle their feathers. It’s that neverending give and take that moves us forward, and separates those that think ahead from those that get left behind.

In the article ‘WiFi before you fly’ pysorg.com discusses how Hartsfield-Jackson now has what’s considered to be the best wifi coverage at any US airport. Forget “hotspots” - all 5.8 million square feet of the airport now enables wifi access.

It’s not free however. According to the article:

“The service at the airport — provided by a number of companies — ranges from $7.95 per day to $38 a month for access for frequent fliers.”