We’re all connected, aren’t we?

I am sitting here on July 5^th up at my in-laws in the beautiful state of NH. They live in a fairly populated area of NH not far from one of the outlet malls that seem so profligate up here. I have spent plenty of time using both my Macbook Air and my iPad while visiting them and it has led me to one universal truth, no matter which device you are using, it’s all about the network!

Where I live in NJ, I have a home connection that averages about 40Mb down and anywhere from 5-15Mb up. At work, depending on the time of day, I have a connection that flies as well. On the drive up to NH I used my iPad most of the way and was glad to see that I had a Verizon LTE connection most of the way. It all started to go South, literally as we passed the city of Concord NH. My Verizon connection hopped down to 3g, which is passable but I figured, so what, only 20 minutes from the in-laws, I could hold out until then. (To be fair – I also have an AT&T device and it suffered the same issues – but not as bad)

That was my downfall. My in-laws have a connection that on a good day runs maybe 500kb down and we won’t talk about the upload speeds other then to say they were pitiful. Being that I recently threw out a 300kb modem when we moved houses how bad could this be. Let’s be clear – all those web sites that you’re used to springing up at the touch of the mouse button, they’re slow. If you remember dialup, that’s what they looked like, and if you don’t remember dialup just think of a bad Verizon 3g connection, which takes 5 minutes to load a web page. The difference is you no longer have the ability to turn off images easily (yes it can be done).

Things get a little better when surfing from my phone, many of the sites are optimized for mobile so they don’t use nearly as much bandwidth as the regular sites do. I had the opportunity to change my iPad to mobile sites if I wanted to but why waste a 9.7” screen that way – seems a little strange.

This all came to a head two different times this week. The first was when I tried to download a 500Mb file and set the rest of the house back to the Stone Age. Every other device became unusable, as there really wasn’t enough bandwidth to share. I found a way to limit the bandwidth used for downloading but then realized I was saving it to my Dropbox which was trying to sync it up to the cloud which also made life miserable for everyone. Everything got scheduled for after everyone went to bed. Cloud just doesn’t work well when you don’t have a good connection. Forget trying to save something to your Dropbox and if you want to cache it locally and it more than 50Kb then give it up. Almost everything I had in the cloud was useless.

The second occasion was when I had to log into work. Amazingly the VPN connection actually worked (took over a minute to connect vs. the usual seconds) and I was able to connect to the internal network. Then I decided to run an RDP session to see if I could get a better experience by just sending pixels and clicks. While RDP/VDI/SBC may be the wave of the future, the connection wasn’t good enough. I fell back to an HTML5 web experience that didn’t require a synchronous connection. Took over 10 minutes to get a 30 second job done but I did get it done.

The lesson here, and I have had this conversation with Todd Smith more than once, is that until the network is ubiquitous, don’t expect everything mobile to work perfectly. Sometimes don’t expect mobile to work at all. Just because you have a network connection doesn’t mean that you can actually do anything with it.

The update for this post will be published not from my in-law’s house but rather from one of the places (20 miles away) where we are taking our kids that has a free WiFi connection which functions much better than anything in their town.