The Wonders of Wireless

By Steven

Wireless technology is truly amazing.

In the early ‘90s, I was testing an email service that sent packets over the pager network. It was slow but it worked. Heck, most modems back then were only 14.4k, so I didn’t really notice the lack of speed.

I also had one of those new svelte cell phones. You know, the ones about the size of a brick.

I was able to wander over to Bryant Park on nice days, hang out, blaze through my email and voice mail and crank out documentation and memos (lots of memos). If someone needed my presence, I was a mere 5 minutes away. (Since the office elevators took longer than that, I could scoot back to work, dash up the stairs and be available quicker than colleagues already in the building.) I couldn’t stay out long, since battery life was none too great and those devices were power-hungry pigs. But with judicious power management, I could eke out 90 to 120 minutes. I had a heck of a tan, too, important for a one-time Florida beach bum.

My neighbors – especially those working in the telecommunications industry – were very impressed (with the connectivity, not the tan).

Fast forward 10 years.

My neighbors and I all have wireless networks blanketing the neighborhood. We all have really svelte cell phones, and have come to expect universal connectivity. A number of people I know (spousal unit included) have Blackberry pagers, and get really antsy if they go an hour without getting any email.

But what technology makes, technology can rend asunder.

Usually, my new laptop tells me about available wireless networks and hooks up to one. So when we scheduled this trip to Europe, I relaxed.

(Europe, you ask? Yes, I’m self-employed/unemployed, a condition not conducive to European vacations. But my wife has a great job and has been working brutal hours. She wanted to go to Europe and had the overtime checks to pay for it. Who was I to say no?)

The hotels and numerous nearby locations had all said they had wireless networks. I had a few things going I had to monitor, and my wife really can’t be away from work for too long. Plus, my kids need their daily fix of instant messenger or they get really (I mean really) cranky. I packed my trusty laptop, European power connectors and list of Wi-Fi hotspots, ready to face the world.

The hotel in London does, in fact have the wireless network touted on its website. Ditto for the fulltime high-speed Internet connection. But the wireless network isn’t set up for guests to use. Heck, the hotel can barely use it. No one I could originally find knows the SSID or encryption key (geek alert: that's stuff you need to know to set up a wireless network), and the network seems to be down more than up. The night manager said some outside contractor he doesn’t want to call manages the network and set everything up, leaving me in the lurch.

The hotel's Internet Room does have two computers. One of them actually works, and can reach the Internet. Oops. The home page appears to belong to some German hackers. I’ve cleaned off some nasty viruses and spyware, taken the pornography off it and done a few things to increase users’ privacy. I’m OK with my kids using it for instant messaging and playing games (assuming I can doublecheck it first), but a little leery of logging on to any of my trusted networks or clients’ systems.

The hotel in Paris had a similar computer in the lobby. It had the first 14-inch CRT screen (out of focus, bad color) I’ve seen in ages. It was also €10 (about $12.50) upfront to use for one hour. No rebate for time unused. Rather than use that, I looked for a wireless network. The hotel didn’t have one, but the manager said there were a number in the area. There were, with three readily available: from another hotel out one window, the brasserie on the corner and from Gare du Nord across the street.

It’s a shame I couldn’t use them.

All of them were pay services, none with service providers I normally use. Not that big a deal, I assumed, since they all accepted payment from a mobile phone number or credit card. Oops. My cell phone is U.S. only (great coverage in my home area) and hence no deal with European WiFi agencies. AmEx didn’t validate my card (I rarely use it in Europe, and the anti-fraud software kicked in). I’m using a Mac these days, and both Web browsers (Internet Explorer and Safari) had problems with the last secure server I tried with my MasterCard. It looked as if my card was charged (it turns out that it was, multiple times), but I never got the authentication codes needed to actually connect.

We relied on my wife’s Blackberry for connectivity. A client provided me with one back in 2000, and yes, they are addictive. Useful, but very addictive. We used my wife’s to change hotel and train reservations when our schedule changed, notify family that we would be in places on different days, and to try to arrange a meeting with my brother in Saudi Arabia, whose path we would cross on our last day in London.

Everything went fine until the return trip from Paris to London. Somewhere in the Channel Tunnel, the Blackberry lost connectivity. It grabbed a GSM network as we came out of the tunnel, and we needed a GPRS network. (Yes, yes. More geek. It was like having a DVD disk and a CD player. They don't match up). Having cleverly grabbed a copy of her IT department’s "Blackberry help sheet for international user," my wife (and I) thought it would be a snap to fix. Alas, nothing worked. A trip to the AT&T; website listed in the documentation was fruitless. Ditto for the notes sent to the company help desk back in New York. Their recommendations were the things in the documentation, things we clearly said we had tried. Their response? Try again. (Hmm. The first 15 times it didn’t work. Let’s do it again!)

We turned the Blackberry off and stuffed it in a small bag for several days, waiting for divine intervention on our next road trip. (Although Stonehenge was not on our itinerary, we considered going just to see if the local Druids could make the thing work.) It didn’t work in Oxford, but somewhere between there and Stratford on Avon, in the sparsely settled Cotswolds, it fired up again. Either the muse struck, or the Vodaphone dead zone allowed it to switch over to Orange. (I was holding out Warwick Castle, our next stop, as my best hope. After all, an Earl of Warwick had tried and executed Joan of Arc. A malfunctioning Blackberry should have been child’s play in comparison.) Moments later, the battery died. It turns out that the international charger didn’t connect properly to the Blackberry. Alas poor Blackberry, we knew it well.

Back in the hotel, I ran across the local networking consultant. A nice guy, he was having problems dealing with the construction of the hotel, the contract with the ISP, a technophobic hotel owner and recalcitrant wireless technology. Had I been in a position to abandon the wife and kids for a day, I probably could have talked the hotel owner into a room upgrade or other freebies just for helping the consultant with the problems. I couldn’t do anything about the contract, but the others would have been easy to handle. (A better room and no dad for a day. I bet I know which way the kids would have voted.) The consultant did give me some of the information I needed to connect, but neglected to disable MAC address filtering (yes, yes, more geek stuff), leaving me offline.

I did manage to connect at the local Starbucks – quickly and easily – spending a dreary, cold morning sucking down coffee and croissants and stamping out crises back at home.

Now for the tan.

February 21, 2004