Internet Access at 80MPH

My daughter has finished her work in Fort Lauderdale, FL and — after shipping her car to her in January since it was far cheaper than renting one — I flew down on Sunday to drive home with her this week.

As part of my experience on this trip (besides great quality time with my girl and client work I’ll be performing) is to live with various technologies and assess first-hand the current ubiquity of Internet access (especailly Wifi) throughout the southern States.

For the last half hour I’ve been connected to the Internet while she’s been driving 80mph (yeah I know…the speed limit is 70mph but people are going by us like we’re standing still). I connected to my Treo 700p (I’ve got Verizon unlimited broadband on my account) via Bluetooth and it’s amazingly rock solid. I’ve been averaging just over 300kbps download and 84kbps upload speed (I’ve checked it three times and averaged it). While slow by typical broadband speeds, this is still incredibly useful.

Besides just the usual productivity stuff I now have access to, we had no idea where we’d stay when we got to the northern part of Florida. I researched hotels, found one and proceeded to book the reservation online and it worked flawlessly! Using Google Maps, I now have PDF’s I’ve printed in a folder on my computer desktop with detailed directions (though I also have Google Maps on my Treo…but this gives me A LOT more pixels to gaze at).

Granted we’re on the Interstate highway and these corridors are typically saturated with connections but still, I can’t help but be delightfully amazed that I’m sitting here typing this and on the ‘net.