Edited email transcript between me and my brother today about his journey to work at a client site…
—BEGIN—
New thing for today: Skype from a train at 100 mph. It’s a good job that the networking world is built on QoS, otherwise, sharing the same link with everyone else on the train, the sound could have been terrible. Oh, hold it a sec, …
WiFi on intercity trains is great. Now, the reason Skype rules on trains is because of the following two scenarios:
(A) You call your colleague on your mobile phone. Train enters tunnel, you and colleague can no longer talk. You come out of tunnel and seconds afterwards, you lose your connection. WHAT! I’ve just come out of the tunnel. You then have to wait for 15 seconds before the signal indicator on your phone seems to indicate it’s back on the network. You call back … until the next tunnel. Then you get pissed off and text “I’ll call you when I’m in the office”.
or…
(B) You remembered to bring your laptop and headset, so you can use Skype. You call your colleague. You enter a tunnel and keep talking because the WiFi signal is still there. Even when the connection rate becomes poor, you don’t get cut off; the sound quality just degrades a bit, but picks up again immediately when the throughput is better.
All this and simultaneously you can hold a chat session with your ex-colleague who is maintaining some databases in Perth, Australia on the other side of the planet and (slowly) replicating your e-mail and reading your Bloglines RSS feeds.
I like scenario B better. Makes the first class ticket worth it.
Because of my extra 3 hours of work on the train from Newcastle to
London, I’ll go away at 5pm today. Travelling didn’t suck after all.
As British Rail said in the 1980’s, “We’re getting there”.
—END—
Posted by Martin Geddes at 4:10 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telepocalypse.net/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/mgeddes/MT/mt-tb.cgi/447