Terry Jones

Antonio over at the Onda has a post up about Productivity and being Always-On. He’s got comments turned off, so I’m going to make a few here.

First of all, I really enjoy Antonio’s writings. That’s why I read his blog. But today I just need to push back a little :-) I think all four of Antonio’s points about what you can expect to go wrong are rather weak and/or misleading.

Let’s go through them.

Power (this one was on me for being unprepared). Between Spain and England, I discovered 3 different plug types. What is more, if you travel with a laptop and a phone (more than one device to plug in) and check in late, good luck getting the hotels to have anything to lend you to plug your American appliances in.

You could substitute the U.S. for Spain or the UK in this sentence and it would remain true. There’s actually a good deal of standardized plug size across Europe. Yes, the UK and the US (and some other countries) do things differently. But Spain is part of a large swathe of countries that follow a standard. I could mention the use of 110 volt devices, but I wont. But I do suggest, just for fun, going to the reception of some US hotels and asking them if they have a European plug converter they could lend you. Or try asking for two. I’ve lived 10 years in the US and 10 years in Europe and I have a fairly strong opinion about where you’re more likely to find accommodating help for stuff that requires regular employees of a company to even be aware of the existence of other countries.

Consistent SMS/data on your cellphone. Having just switched to a GSM network, I was really excited by the prospect of 3G networks and zippy-fast mobile data. While voice worked everywhere, SMS and data did not. In fact, SMS was the flakiest of all of the services that I’ve come to rely on— I could receive messages almost everywhere, but I had at best 50% odds of being able to send them.

I’d put this down to (probably) having a mixture of Europe and US carriers involved. I also spent nearly 5 years working in the cell phone industry and know first hand from various carriers that passing SMS between their networks is (or was a few years back) hugely flaky. Someone from a US carrier (I don’t remember which), told me that, officially, US-Euro SMS was not supported by their network but that messages did sometimes “leak” through, but they weren’t sure how! In Spain I find SMS extremely reliable, and I send probably 200/month. When in the US I also have not-infrequent problems, in both directions.

And as far as the wi-fi is concerned, it does seem to be fairly ubiquitous, but in 100% of the cases it was expensive and encumbered by either its billing mechanism or by some lame proxy server setup that blocked most of the useful Internet services you’d want to get access to.

The same could easily be said of the US, and probably every other country. This is too general a complaint – I’ve encountered expensive brain-dead wifi all over the place. One pleasant exception is the airport at Las Vegas, with free wifi. Plus see below.

Overall Internet speed. Finally, the speed of “broadband” connections (especially in Spain) is painful. In this new world of rich Internet applications, it’s easy to forget that we’ve only just been able to get to the point where we can use them in the US and that this is far from a given for other parts of the world. For instance, in Spain Tabblo.com was completely unusable, and even Gmail was severely hobbled by the dearth of bandwidth.

This is also very weak. Who was the ISP? In what city? What sort of bandwidth was the contract? How many different places, ISPs, did you try out? It’s like saying “I went to the US and my broadband connection sucked, so therefore broadband connections suck in the US”. FWIW, I’ve had an ADSL connection with a fixed IP address in Barcelona for about 7 years. I had the connection for several years, at a cost of about US$30/month during which the CEO of the company I worked for in Manhattan couldn’t even get any DSL connection to his Manhattan apartment. I mean nothing. He was using a modem for years while I had a much zippier always-on connection. These days I have a theoretical max of 1Mb up and 20Mb down, and the last time I tested it it was running at about 6Mb. A connection at that speed can be had from Ya for just US$26/month. I ssh into servers and the connections stay up until I close them (often many days). I can even work with Tabblo. I know dozens of people here who use GMail as their only mail source, and I’ve seen it working just fine, without noticeable delay.

That’s it for now I guess. While I’m sure Antonio’s experiences happened, they read like someone comparing their comfortable home setup with what they experienced as a foreign tourist. Of course those experiences will be very different, even if the underlying services are identical. You see the same thing when tourists complain about how expensive a country is. Yes, you can pay 12 euros (US$16!) for a large (and I mean beer stein large) Fanta on the Ramblas. But that says more about you than it does about Spain :-)

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