Bit by Bit: Fast Internet Access and Steaming Hot Coffee

Brian Lawler

You are a creative pro on the go. It seems you spend half your life meeting with clients, a quarter waiting for proofs, and the “other half” on the phone. There is little time left for the creative work, and sleep is out of the question. Your cell phone rings constantly, your Palm Pilot is packed with appointments, notes, and new ideas. Your laptop is your window into the world — your traveling production machine and communication conduit. With this computer you can work almost anywhere.

When you check into a hotel, you plug your computer into the hotel’s data port and connect to get your email. The connection is slow, but it works. You hope that the office has forwarded that proof, a 10MB PDF of your customer’s product booklet. The time you spend online is valuable, but it’s still too much time. You have arranged to meet your client at a nearby Starbucks coffee shop for a morning meeting. Downloading your PDF proof over the hotel’s dial-up connection is impractically slow, and will probably make you late. So you decide to wing it without the file.

Disconnected in the Big Apple
This is the situation I faced on a recent trip to New York. When I checked into my hotel just off Times Square, I was unable to connect my PowerBook to the telephone, and no high-speed connection was available. This hotel is not as thoroughly modern as the rest of the neighborhood.

Directly across the street was a Starbucks coffee shop (directly across every street in Manhattan is a Starbucks!), where I noticed a sign in the window that said “T-Mobile HotSpot” (see Figure 1). Looking closer, I read that this shop offers broadband wireless access. I made a mental note to look into this (somehow I’d managed to avoid — or ignore — the annoying T-Mobile commercials starring Catherine Zeta-Jones or else I might have had a different reaction).

Figure 1: T-Mobile HotSpots are marked with this sign, seen here at a local Starbucks coffee shop.

Back at my office, I searched out the T-Mobile HotSpot Web site. Interestingly, there are more than 2,000 locations now, in 21 states. My PowerBook is already wired to communicate with the system (it’s 802.11b technology – on my Mac it’s called Airport), so I’m ready to go. This HotSpot system, installed at many Starbucks stores, in numerous airports, and in most of American Airlines’ Admirals Clubs, consists of a T1-speed local wireless network running on standard technology, so both Macintosh and Windows computers, many personal digital assistants, and some other mobile devices (mostly portable phones) can communicate.

When you are in range, and that range is variable up to a few hundred feet of the transceiver, you can connect to the Internet, check your mail, download that 10MB file, cruise the World Wide Web, listen to streaming audio, watch streaming video (check out Wallace & Gromit). And you can enjoy a steaming lattè at the same time (see Figure 2)!

Figure 2: Running wireless, a subscriber can fly around the Internet at T1 speeds (1.54 Mb/sec.).

Sign In, Surf On, Drink Up
T-Mobile offers a free one-day trial for those who want to try the service, which I accordingly did. I signed up, which is frighteningly similar to signing up for a paid contract, and gave it a spin (there is some significant fine print you should read when enlisting the service). At the local Starbucks, my PowerBook found the T-Mobile signal immediately, and I was able to launch my browser and reach the T-Mobile site in a few more seconds. I logged-on with my account name and password and was flying online at about three times the speed of my office DSL line.

The experience was very pleasant, to be honest. While connected I downloaded the latest versions of several software products that take a long time to download with DSL. I tried eBay, Amazon, the Apple site, a few video and audio sites, and while there I enjoyed a mocha and had a slice of cheesecake. Who’d have thought a temporary connection at a coffee shop would be faster, more convenient, and tastier than my office set-up?

While at Starbucks I had the chance to talk to another customer who was using the wireless network. We discussed the service, the speed, and the fees. The fellow is an international traveler who has high-speed access at his office, but who often spends time in France and Germany. Connecting in hotel rooms on his European trips is very difficult, so the T-Mobile option is a good alternative for him. He considers the price rather steep, but suggests that this service, like service in the early days of cellular phones, will be costly to early adopters and then become less expensive as the service becomes more popular and as competitors arrive on the scene.

The Coffee Costs Extra
The price we will pay for this unfettered, untethered access varies. The lattè is about $3.60 (about a dollar more at the airport stores) and T-Mobile service is as much as $14 per hour if you choose the pay-as-you-go plan. Contracts start at $29.99 per month for local access, and $49.99 a month for national access. There is no limit to your connect time when you have a contract (although you may have to pay more, as show in the sidebar), so sitting around the coffee shop may be habit-forming.

A couple of dollars a day for T1 access on a portable computer might be just right for the digerati, but if this service is purchased in addition to a wired connection (DSL or cable modem at $39.95 per month, for example), then the combined cost may prove to be prohibitive. Students on a budget can ill afford such extravagance, and the occasional business traveler probably doesn’t consume enough coffee in a month to justify a subscription to this service. This is obviously a plan for professionals on the move.

Would I pay for it? I signed up for the pay-as-you-go plan, so I am on the hook for some fairly costly connections when I choose to use the service. However, next time I am in New York, unable to connect in my hotel room or in need of a higher-speed connection than is available in my room, I will use the service and I will pay the higher price for it — but I know there will be times I’ll be glad that I did.

For the right person, and I count myself among them, HotSpots provide a fast and effective way to connect to the Internet while away from the office. And, Starbucks coffee shops and Admirals Clubs make good meeting places, so it’s not impractically expensive to use as an office away-from-the-office to take your proofs or video presentations to your customers.

T-Mobile offers a one-day free pass to their system. There is no fee to become a member (although you do have to provide credit card and personal information), and there is no obligation to continue the subscription after the free day. Find a table at the local Starbucks, turn your lap-top on, and away you go at T1 speed to destinations unknown!

Now, when that apartment over the Starbucks store becomes available….