[More in my series about cyber-nomads, entitled “I’m a Turtle”]

Wayne Hodgins runs a great blog Off Course-On Target – he is the e-learning guru at Autodesk, just north of here. And is involved in many important initiatives related to online learning. And Wayne travels. A lot.

In a recent post (11 May 2007), Online vs. Offline, he discusses the current trend toward web-based “applications” (such as Google Docs), but at the same time raises the question of whether these applications can thrive when individuals do not have “always-on” or even very good Internet connectivity.

Here’s what I wrote in response to Wayne’s article (with slight paraphrasing because you already have more background because you read my blog)…

The Internet/computer room – Chonor House – Dharamsala, India

If you travel to even-farther-removed places [than the US and EU], the connectivity issue becomes really critical. When I’m in Northern India – Dharamsala H.P. – we used to always use Internet cafes. Up to about 12 months ago you had to use their computers – you couldn’t plug your computer into their router unless you could convince the proprietor that it was safe – or that it could even be done. Then they got wise and now we plug in directly – paying the same fee as if we were using their computers, but we’re wired right up. Back then they had 10 to 15 computers sharing one DSL line (128k bi-directional is pretty typical for 10 people to be sharing). Now bandwidth is a bit better, but still limited. I work alongside another org that has community mesh wi-fi available in the same town, with broadband uplinks to the Internet, and I can use that if I arrange it in advance and pay for the bytes I transfer, but I have to really do it at night when traffic is low, which entails a walk down a steep hill in the dark to another hotel where they have a wi-fi access point to the mesh, in the lobby, and then I sit in the lobby and get decent connectivity – generally about 512k bidirectional all to myself. [Read more…]