Last night, in the middle of the night, I plugged a cable from my new cellphone into my laptop. An experiment was underway.
Since the phone is on the Internet, it’s possible to tether it to my laptop and use the cell connection as an Internet connection. In essence, the Samsung Blackjack would be my modem.
It was very simple and it worked, but it was ploddingly slow. Though the phone works with AT&T’s high speed 3G network, there’s no 3G service here. I ran a speed test and found 76 kbps. My cable modem speed a moment ago was 7,275 kbps, nearly one hundred times as fast.
At least I know it works in case of an outage.
There’s something else I thought of at the same time. Back in the dial-up days, when modems were 28.8 kbps, I used to connect at 24.4 kbps.
As slow as last night’s experiment was, it was still three times faster than the Internet service I used to be happy with. Times have really changed.
What we have now for connection speed is only a stop, not the destination.
Some of us are still in a cave – I coped for 7 years with an average speed of 28 kbps (often slower, sometimes even a 14) – which was just a few months ago upped to between 46 and a 49 kbps. As ploddingly slow as that is, I still notice and am grateful for even that little bit of difference. It does not pay to live in such a rural area.