Road connections: What's your need for speed?
What's your connection "type" when you travel? I'm not talking about finding a date when you're out of town. I'm talking about Internet hookups.
How you connect to the Internet may not be as sexy as how you navigate a singles cruise, but it is important. Make the wrong link and you could end up wasting time, spending lots of money and even losing important information. Make the right one and your productivity will soar.
Recent studies suggest most of us travelers continue to use a dial-up connection to get online, with a smaller percentage subscribing to a high-speed cable or DSL connection. As of late 2003, only 1 in 10 travelers has tried wireless access, though nearly 90% say they see wireless computing in their futures.
But travelers — especially business travelers — are quicker to embrace technology. I think travelers have split into these three camps below — I call them the "connection personality types" — which strongly favor one type of Internet link over another. I also give a blanket approximation to the size of each market.
What's your type? Let's take a closer look at all three.
1. Donna Dial-Up (40% of the market). Donna likes a sure thing. She isn't impressed by the high cost of high-speed Internet access and is wary of upgrading to a wireless modem or a new PC. Connecting at a slower speed suits her just fine, because she rarely has to surf the Web and uses a private e-mail account that is rigged to receive messages from a few important clients and family members. Donna Dial-Up keeps her phone calls to less than 20 minutes to avoid incurring additional hotel connection fees. She travels with a toolkit with adapters and filters to make sure she can tap into a phone line anytime, anywhere.Eric Fishhaut considers himself a Donna (make that a Don) Dial-up. "Why pay ten bucks a day for a high-speed connection when you only need to be online for 20 minutes?" asks Fishhaut, a vice president for a Chicago software company. For him, it all comes down to making more with less bandwidth. A phone line and conventional modem works just fine for that.
2. Bobby Broadband (40%). Bobby does lots of business on the Internet and goes to great lengths to find a high-speed connection wherever he stays. It isn't the cost of new technology that fazes him, but the time spent waiting to download documents online. Bobby owns multiple e-mail accounts and some of them overflow with large documents. He's always online. He also spends a fair amount of time Web conferencing and sharing files that would take forever to download on a dial-up connection. Bobby likes the simplicity of a broadband link — usually all it takes is no more than a cable and a few tweaks to his network settings to get started. The $10 a day he spends on the high-speed account is a bargain.Doug Jensen is the archetypal Bobby Broadband. "I always try hard to stay at hotels with high-speed Internet access," says the Boston researcher. "I live on the Internet. I download lots of big files. I browse many sites intensely and for at least several hours a day. I could not function professionally in most cases without high-speed Internet access."
3. Wanda Wireless (20%). Wanda is a heavy Internet user and a frequent traveler. She spends so much time in airports that if she didn't have Internet access, her productivity would probably plummet. She likes having the latest gadgets and is willing to sacrifice reliability for it. Price is less of a problem for her. Although she doesn't consider herself a bandwidth hog, occasionally, she'll need to download a large presentation to her laptop. A Wi-Fi modem gets the job done for her. Wanda isn't worried about an absence of hotspots because she rarely travels anywhere that doesn't offer a high-speed wireless network."My favorite method of connecting is Wi-Fi," says Allen Dietz, a consultant from Wenatchee, Wash. "Because I often have long layovers at the Seattle airport, I've joined the Alaska Airlines Board Room. They've installed high-speed Internet access in all the lounges, so I just plug in my Wi-Fi card and surf."
Most people who travel professionally don't limit themselves to just one connection type. At least I don't. On one of my last business trips, I traveled with all three, and found myself making some interesting choices.
My first hotel offered free local calls. I spent the weekend there, and didn't anticipate any editorial emergencies, so I slipped into my Don Dial-Up persona. I connected to the Internet through a dreadfully slow 28.8 Kbps line, but it didn't matter to me because it was free. On Monday, I moved to another hotel where each phone call cost $1.50. Clients were beginning to call my cell phone and my e-mail box started to fill up. It was time to go wireless.
I found a wireless network operated by a local Internet service provider, and I signed up for a week of service for $29.95. Over the next few days, I saved $40 in communications charges and, quite possibly, thousands of dollars in lost productivity. The wireless modem offered me amazing mobility, too. I could check e-mail from the local cafe and hang out in the hotel lobby while researching my next column.
Of course, my ideal Internet connection would be as inexpensive as a dial-up, as reliable as broadband and as flexible as wireless. A guy can dream, can't he?