I was on vacation for the last 2 weeks. I had my laptop, my iPad and my Android phone with me to make sure I could do some reading, writing and thinking. I hardly use paper or even a hard disk, I completely rely on the cloud: gmail, google docs, mindmeister, facebook, twitter, online newspapers, blogs, etc. But that means that internet access is key. And this isn’t as obvious as I thought it would be. I refuse to pay a ridiculous 3,63 € per megabyte for mobile roaming. That would cost me a couple hundred euros on a 2 week vacation. So I had all my hopes set on WiFi.
I spend my first week sailing in the Netherlands. In the marina of Yerseke I found a KPN hotspot. I got myself a 24,95€ subscription for a week. But the quality was terrible: the connection was slow and I had to stay outside to keep my connection alive – which isn’t very pleasant when it is raining. I don’t mind paying for stuff, but then it has got to work in a reasonable way.
The second week of my vacation I was in the south of France. There I discovered FON. Fon claims to be the world’s largest WiFi community. The idea is that all Fon members – called Foneros – create a public hotspot with their Fon Wifi router. Other Fon members can access the Fon hotspots for free, while non-members can buy passes for as little as 3 € per day. I like the idea of individuals sharing their WiFi connection in an organized way, but as the quality of service depends on the proximity to the router, there is no guaranteed service level. And again I had to hang out of the 2nd floor window to keep my connection up.
Fon is a great idea, but it requires a massive amount of users.
This experience got me a little worried. I’ve made myself dependent on internet services to do basically anything, but we’re still far from global reliable internet access. And wasn’t really planning to stay at home to have access.
