This time around

(Originally published on infoSync) This time around, in my bi-weekly twaddle on the wireless world out there, I will try to revisit a week long trip to Scrimignano, a tiny village in Italy, comfortably situated between Milano and Genova in the middle of nowhere. A small apartment in this 10 house place on top of a small hill among bigger hills, accessible by a small twisted road where driving yields the constant terror of that other car coming head on from around the corner, was the space called home by myself and two friends for a week. Room is tight and I will come right down to the wireless bit, looking out of the window to the mobile communications tower sitting right next to Montemarzino, another small village, where several days were passed at a pool overlooking the valley and letting the eye wonder farther than imagined by somebody used to smoggy city air.

Let’s go right to the bad side of things. GPRS roaming is not what it could be as of yet, as I was not able to use GPRS with my standard T-Mobile Germany subscription in Italy — and using the phone to call some foreign dial-up account was out of the question. For that reason, the next stop was an electronics store in the next big city, Tortona, to get a TIM prepaid card. Why? Well, it seems that TIM has GPRS introduction pricing giving you a GPRS flatrate for 10 EURs for 30 days. A Mobile Phones Geek’s images of heaven erupted. Of course, it is far from that easy, mainly because of the language called Italian that has still to be mastered by yours truly. GPRS is not turned on by default and nobody seems to be able to give me the settings I needed.

Thankfully I remembered that most hotlines use 9 or 0 to be connected to a live operator and when I finally managed to get somebody on the line, that person obviously speaks as much English as I do Italian. A stream of words comes across from my end and I seem to have made myself reasonably clear that I need GPRS to be turned on, hoping that this will get me the flat-rate by default. After a short pause on the other end, I am told something with “GPRS” in it, and what my friends and I presume to mean tomorrow. Not even thinking about trying to explain that we need the APN and DNS servers, we take a painful step. We dial up over another phone to holland and connect to the internet with one of the three laptops at our disposal and finally get all the settings we need.

Sadly, it didn’t seem like “tomorrow” was part of the sentence by the help desk person after all, because GPRS was did not work tomorrow — or any other day, for that matter. As this was after all a holiday, and being cut off from the world out there without any news or e-mail was starting to feel good, we called it quits right there. Someone could have made oodles of money off of us if it was not for the language barrier, and they would have just kept us hooked. Ah well, this is life. Life that is at the brink of having enabled us to do something very much in a geeky nature and actually, something that would have been useful for a lot of people, if GPRS was usable right there from the start. What was it you ask? Let me explain.

We brought with us, among other things, a Nokia 6310 and an Acer USB Bluetooth stick working on an Apple iBook, not yet configured for GPRS (although we would have figured that out in no time if it wasn’t for the pesky language problems). We also had an Airport card in the iBook and Orinoco Wireless LAN cards in the other two laptops working like a charm. We could have set up the Residential Gateway which would have been amazing fun if it had either bluetooth to connect to the phone or better yet, a GSM/GPRS card included, but it didn’t, so we left that one turned off. What we did have though was a full blown 10 Mbps wireless network up and running somewhere in the midst of nowhere, letting us, within our group, even go on top of some mountain or to the pool, being able to work on presentations and other things together. With an antenna that was powerful enough, we might even have been able to connect a few villages, add GPRS flatrate and have entire villages on the Internet in no time. This is the glimpse of the future I’m talking about, and it’s coming. It will take a bit of time, it will move slowly, it will be started by geeks — but eventually, it will be everywhere.

That future will arrive, of that I’m sure — and the only question is when, of which the answer is influenced by ease of use and price. In the end, it will probably change the way we work, play and interact, letting us do so anywhere and at any time. Big words? Well, it might go slower than we’d like, but as long as we continue moving, I see a bright future ahead. Oh, the joys of wireless.