The Mobile Warrior

So last week, as you all know, I was in Cape May, New Jersey. Beautiful place. For those of you in the know, I posted pictures in the usual place, and for those of you not in the know - e-mail me for the URL.

Anyhow, since I am the majority stockholder of a corporation (well, the only stockholder, but that could change someday - mwah-hah-hah), I felt it would behoove me to have the ability to do business while away. So I made arrangements with a couple of fellow freelancers to cover for me in-person if necessary, and set out to figure out how to be as location-independent as possible.

I already forward my phone to my cell phone whenever I'm out of the office anyway by default. So I just needed to worry about data.

My PowerBook has Bluetooth, so I already use it with my Sony Ericsson T610 and iSync. I also have a copy of Salling Clicker, letting me use it as a remote control for my PowerBook as well. Real slick stuff.

(I refer to it as "living la vida Bluetooth")

I had a couple of choices for remote data connectivity: either Cingular's GPRS service or the just-released (for Mac, that is) Verizon Wireless 1xRTT support. Cingular was running a promotion where for $19.95 per month you can buy their "Media Works" package - a ridiculous amount of text messages and unlimited GPRS. Verizon, on the other hand, sells "Express Network", which offers faster service via the PC Card cellular modem and the faster 1xRTT network. Verizon speeds are reputed to be approximately 60-100k with bursts at 144k, while current GPRS is typically more like 50k and a max of 100k. The advantage of GPRS? Cost. The disadvantage? Slower speeds, plus you can't use your cell phone for voice while it's being used as a Bluetooth-based modem.

Anyhow, I figured I'd test both that week, and keep active whichever one served my needs best. Problem one: Verizon doesn't keep the PC Cards in their stores. So I couldn't buy one. Or even test it in-store. So that was out. I already wrote about my travails in getting GPRS service working properly - it was ultimately fixed shortly before I left for Jersey.

Fortunately, when I arrived in Cape May I found that the owner of the rental home (who lived in an apartment on the first floor) used a wireless AP himself that was unsecured. More importantly, he didn't mind sharing his connection. So that covered me most of the time in the house. In gratitude, I spent a little time one afternoon wiping out all his spyware on his XP laptop.

So in that regard, I was covered well. In fact, I handled several business calls requiring me to go online to check messages and such - I set up SSL-secured IMAP and SMTP AUTH access to my office mail server before leaving for the trip and was able to keep up-to-date well.

(minor quibble: I'm still having trouble getting the SME box to recognize my self-signed certificates in place of the factory default ones - which is a pain for my Mac's Keychain)

On the occasions I used the GPRS support, it worked well. Connections take a short time to negotiate - about 10 seconds - and average speeds seemed to me to be about 70+k per second. It appears that Cingular proxies everything, so SSH wouldn't have been a lot of fun had I needed it, but otherwise all the services I did need to use were OK. I know Cingular is frantically upgrading their data network (and counting on AT&T Wireless to help) to be more competitive with Verizon - Verizon has already started to replace Express Network with the faster Express Broadband service which promises megabit-plus speeds.

So what are my conclusions, you ask? Well, first of all I used to be a skeptic about cellular data services. But that was when all you could realistically get were the CDPD-ish 19.2k speeds. CDPD is dead now, and being put out of it's misery by AT&T and Verizon who had supported it. Mobitex (the BellSouth/Cingular packet network that was the original Blackberry network) is also on the way out for mainstream usage. The true advantage in technologies like GPRS, 1xRTT, and all the other 2.5G/3G data networks isn't so much that it's useful to make a cell phone an Internet-connected terminal. Simply put, the screen and form factor are too small and inconvenient for the typical cell phone to do much useful stuff on the Internet.

The real use for 2.5G/3G is with computers. Right now there's still a lot of laptops that need to be plugged into an inconvenient land line to be productive on the road. But when you have Internet access at moderate speeds possible via your cell phone, it opens up a whole new world of productivity.

Back about two years ago, when I still worked for a certain little insurance company, I started seriously considering such an idea as a viable way to make our claims adjusters more productive. We didn't go anywhere with it. Which may be symbolic of why they went toilet-bound in the first place. I know as a freelance IT person, the ability to have true universal connectivity is something that's essential for the sake of my clients - and the $20 (Cingular) to $80 (Verizon) that it would cost me is well worth it if it only adds an hour of time I can bill in a month. No-brainer.

For now, I'll stick with the Cingular/GPRS solution despite the minor drawbacks. I will keep an eye on Verizon, though, and if circumstances warrant then that'll become the direction for me down the road.