Saturday, December 28, 2002

Today's T-Mobile Hotspot experiment was an overall success, but the service itself (US$20 for 2 hours online) seems somewhat cost prohibitive for regular use. The Prue-pay minutes don't expire for 120 days.  I may keep some time on the card (US$5/month-ish) to keep the account up, and see how the service evolves.  It certainly won't be a regular thing for me at this point. 10:27:06 PM

Ken Burns, American Stories: Empire of the Air Fascinating look at the early days of radio in America.  All the way back to the days of De Forest and Marconi. It's hard to imagine how amazing this stuff must have been to those living at the time.  Today, we take for granted that voice and music can be transmitted across the country (or across the street).  The growth of the Internet and web in the 1990's doesn't compare in social-changing scope. From the business side, I think there are some similarities.  The rivalries among the early radio entrepreneurs is amusing stuff.  The court battles and patent fighting are reminiscent of what we are seeing today. 10:21:15 PM

Location-oriented networking is one of the ways in which mobile connectivity might become different from the existing, wired Internet (though there's no reason wired devices can't be location-oriented as well). I ought to be able to connect P2P-style and say "hi", swap data, whatever, with whatever other computers are within close proximity.  This would not, neccisarily require devices to be GPS-enabled.  The wi-fi card should (theoretically?) detect what other devices are broadcasting nearby, perform a handshake, exchange security policies, and share data that the device's users have set up as "public".  Something like Napster, or even just web services, might be useful for this. 3:01:11 PM

The T-Mobile Hotspot experience I've been wanting to try out the T-Mobile Hotspot service since it was announced.  Today I had the opportunity. Before leaving the house, I went to the web site and signed up for an account.  I decided to try the US$20 pre-pay, which is perfect for a trial.  It gives me 120 minutes of time.  This is cheaper than the pay as you go option, which is US$2.99 + US$0.25/minute.  When you do the math, you see that the same 120 minutes on this plan woud be US$29.24 (US$2.99 + US$26.25 (105 minutes * US$0.25)).  Clearly, the pre-pay option is cheaper. It took approximately 5 minutes to sign up for the account from home.  The only glitch I hit was that it wouldn't allow non-alphanumeric characters in the login name, so I had to go back and pick a different one.  Otherwise, registration was smooth.  It also seems that one can register on location at the hotspot, if desired. Once I arrived at my local Starbucks, connecting to the network was slightly more complicated, but largely because of the inferior management utility that comes with my built-in wi-fi adapter.  I used Net Stumbler to scan for the SSID (tmobile), but if I had actually read the web site (vs. skimming it), I would have known the setting already. Once associated, logging in was simple.  I connected to an external site, which redirected me to the T-Mobile login page.  One nitpick here: Why do some web developers (or, in my experience, the product management folk who drive the user experience) think they need to resize my browser to full screen?  Do they think it makes it easier to use?  Well, it doesn't.  It's really just, plain annoying.  This annoyance notwithstanding, I was connected and surfing within 5 minutes of ordering my latte. So far, the performance seems excellent.  Currently, I can't imagine these hotspots are anywhere near maximum load.  I can see another guy on his laptop across the way, but I don't know if he's using wi-fi or not.  Effectively, I've got the whole pipe to myself. 2:51:33 PM