Forecast: Partly Cloudy with a Chance of Costly Connectivity

Depending on where you find yourself on this big blue-green planet, Internet access can be virtually as abundant as the very air we breathe. For example, at home and the office, I have ready broadband Internet connectivity via Wi-Fi or 3G access. Heck, I can even jack into an Ethernet port if I want to revisit the 90s. Likewise, when I’m traveling, I’ve always got the 3G connectivity with me. And hotels, restaurants, coffee shops and other oases on the road literally give away Wi-Fi access. Sounds like the vision of the pervasive cloud has come true, right?

Well I’m here to tell you, the world is not quite as interconnected as some people would like to believe. Not yet anyway. A recent trip to Germany really opened my eyes when it comes to getting online and getting things done.

Now Germany’s no slouch when it comes to Internet access. However, I wasn’t about to spend my entire trip camped out in my hotel room or the McDonald’s down the street for Wi-Fi access. I had people to see and things to do.

Unfortunately, 3G roaming access was incredibly expensive. To give you a sense of the costs, at one time I purchased 50 MB of bandwidth for the equivalent of about $50. I logged into my Hotmail account and launched GroupWise. I’d been offline for most of a day, so both programs had to update a few things and download messages, etc. That’s all I did. Within 5 minutes, I’d already blown through 20 MB. Needless to say, I turned off my data roaming for the remainder of the trip. When I wasn’t within radio-shot of a Wi-Fi network, I was incommunicado—and comparatively unproductive because so many of the resources I need to access to are in the cloud.

Sure, the cloud is a hot topic. And the dream of pervasive connectivity is still alive. But if you can’t get to the cloud—or simply can’t afford to—I have to ask: What’s the point?

Companies considering moving everything under the sun to the cloud, give my story some thought. There are many great reasons for adopting the cloud computing model. Just remember, however, a lack of affordable connectivity still persists in parts of this modern world of ours.

Understandably, everyone wants Internet access to be like breathing air, which is still free as of this writing. My situation was more like drowning. There was no air to be had—at least, not at a price that I could live with.

‘Til next time.

–Richard