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Living Without Wi-Fi

15th Jan 2014
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A couple of weeks in New York without immediate access to Wi-Fi is a quick route to insanity.

Twenty years ago, if you went on holiday overseas you would not expect to communicate with home until you got back to Heathrow. Fifteen years ago, the more enterprising might just have found an Internet cafe once or twice.

How the world changes. Even for a respectable accountant writing a few theatre reviews, not to mention the AccountingWEB column and dealing with the general day-to-day matters that flow through e-mail, discovering that the not very glamorous but highly convenient, 45th floor New York apartment has no Wi-Fi was quite chilling.

Not only was it impossible to watch England's efforts to win at least one test match in Australia but also, rather more ironically, the latter stages of the NFL season (that's American football).

Similarly, politics disappeared from view and that might be no bad thing but so did the latest Downton Abbey series, which kept most of New York at home on a Sunday evening. The lack of TV guarantees that.

Basic communications i.e. receiving e-mails also disappeared, unless the firm's BlackBerry was used, which would inevitably cost the equivalent to a weekly salary for a Premier footballer. That would also require repayment in the fullness of time.

In other words, this is an opportunity to discover the kind of dependency that normally only hits users of hard drugs.

The partial solution is obviously to find free Wi-Fi hotspots. This can present ethical questions. Is there a risk that somebody might see you going into Starbucks and assume that you are supporting a group that, in the eyes of many, is responsible for all of the world's evils, especially those relating to tax avoidance? Does it make a difference if you only use the Wi-Fi and do not purchase any of their products?

It helps to discover that the local theatre, one minute’s walk away, had a cafe with Internet access. In the same building, though round the corner, was a particularly trendy boutique hotel that at its fourth floor reception area offered free Wi-Fi and this proved a godsend.

Even so, popping in no more than once or occasionally twice each day was going to be severely embarrassing and potentially lead to a lifetime ban.

So what does somebody with no Wi-Fi do other than burst into tears and gnash teeth? The answer is enjoy a few traditional pleasures such as reading books, sightseeing and watching the odd movie on a netbook. In fact, Alistair Cooke's America was a perfect mix of education and entertainment for a trip to the new country.

However bad my predicament, it pales into insignificance against that of a student who was also borrowing Wi-Fi in the boutique hotel's reception area.

Having just tortuously travelled over from Norway to start a degree course, she was devastated at spending two days I'll swear without Wi-Fi.

Her whole life is based around tablets and phones. This means that she expects to communicate using Skype or an equivalent with family members and friends pretty much constantly, while e-mails and keeping her blog up-to-date were also necessities rather than pleasures.

This short period of absence from the latest technology was a real eye-opener and while there was a kind of acetic pleasure to be derived from heading back into the dark ages, there is a strong likelihood that prior to the next visit overseas, your columnist will be doing some serious research into the kind of technology that can provide constant access to life's little pleasures at whatever cost.

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By User deleted
15th Jan 2014 08:55

Sympathy

As an avid NFL fan (Dolphins - no playoff games for me alas) you have my deepest sympathy! It's bad enough that I can't watch the playoff games live because they're blacked out online due to Sky showing them here. I had to subscribe to Sky online for one month as they were showing a crucial Fins game and there was no way I was going to miss that live! 

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By The 5-50 Coach
16th Jan 2014 14:55

It is odd how things change, your article made me smile nd reminded me of two things:

Being expected to pay £75 for a WiFi connection when staying the The Ritz a couple of years ago, as if the room wasn't expensive enough

How it's not long since we only ever had dial up and how essential broadband has made itself now, that's really scary.

The most annoying thing for me is not being able to get onto iplayer when abroad, hey I have to miss Eastenders :(

 

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Replying to Tax Dragon:
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By JPH007
23rd Jan 2014 11:52

Watching iPlayer

I suggest you download TunnelBear or another VPN app with servers in the UK, switch to the UK IP address they provide and and you can then binge on EastEnders to your heart's delight :-)

 

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By tom123
18th Jan 2014 11:04

Not free in canada either
When I was in Canada with work, and in quite expensive corporate rates hotels, we still had to pay extra for wifi, which felt a bit steep

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By moneymanager
23rd Jan 2014 12:03

Tech for the sake of it.

Part of the 'problem' identified in the piece is that we actually don't need much of what has/is becoming ubiquitous. People don't actually really communicate more but less with devices; everyone must have seen people texting each other virtually across a room; talk to each other!!!

The other part, and sorry if I appear a luddite, is that we may well not be so much 'living with WIFI' but slowly killing ourselves with it and all the other electrical devices of modern (i.e. since around the 1920's) life.

There is a growing body of evidence from as early as the 60s/70s which plotted childhood leukemia rates across the USA which matched precisely the degree to which the countryside became wired up for mains electricity. Numerous incidents in the UK found a strong correlation between such hotspots and the degree to which dwellings were in line of sight of communication masts.

Although his independence became discredited in some circles the late Professor Richard Doll (who was no friend of groups with anti industry interests) proclaimed that the rising levels of personal data protection laws would, in future, preclude the detailed epidemiological studies that had revealed these correlations.

If you are interested/don't believe, take a look at the following:

http://www.electricsense.com/7280/emf-safety-guidelines-dangers

If nothing else you might secure your families future lineage by persuading your sons not to fry their wotsits by holding their i.Pads on their laps.

 

 

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