Cloud should drive mobile connectivity

This week, I'm traveling hectically in different parts of Europe, jumping from a plane to a meeting, to a train, to a hotel, etc. You know what I mean. Staying in touch with the business while doing this is always challenging. First, not a lot of time is left to manage email and other connections; second, you rely on the available facilities to be able to connect.

Fortunately, or is it unfortunately for my shoulder, I still carry a full fledge laptop with me so I can work offline from anywhere. But doing work, preparing blog entries, responding to email, etc. is not really useful if I cannot get it sent to the appropriate people.

And that is what is happening to me at the moment. I ran a visioning workshop yesterday all day, so had no time to get online. I then ran to the station, ending up in a packed train with not even a place to sit down. When I reached the hotel last night, the front desk nicely told me the hotel wifi was down and would not be repaired before today. So, no connectivity. When I left the hotel this morning, there was still no connection. So, I thought I was going to be smart and decided to take a cappuccino in a coffee shop prior to my appointment. Surely they would have Internet connection. Guess what, seven networks were visible, but none from the coffee shop. When asking, I got a nice smile and a negative answer.

This got me moving places to a restaurant, where I ended up asking whether there was Internet connection prior to sitting down. Now I’m learning and getting smarter at it.

Obviously I could have used a 3G/4G dongle, but on the one hand that can be very expensive, particularly when you are roaming, and on the other I keep realizing that in most places 3G is not consistently available, so the network falls back on EDGE and other slower protocols. So, why pay so much money for a sloppy service?

This reminded me about the blog post I wrote a while ago on the super mobile worker.   Fortunately I was not in his shoes; it would have been a real catastrophe.

You know we keep talking about cloud, we are expecting cloud services to be dirt cheap and we take the network for granted. I increasingly see the network as the big barrier for cloud adoption by mobile workers. Frankly, I would love to be able to carry a lighter device (and my shoulder even more), but I cannot today as I cannot rely on connectivity. A couple things really need to be put in place:

• Something has to be done regarding the data cost on telco networks at the moment, particularly when roaming in multiple countries. This can consist in a reduction of charges of existing environments or in the implementation of new technologies such as WImax and others in towns and public places.
• Hotels should understand a quality wifi service is part of the package. I have noticed that the more expensive the hotel, the more costly the wifi service in the hotel, does that make sense? Not in my mind.
• Bars, restaurants, particularly in business districts, have to understand the importance of providing connection services to their customers. Now that most services allow for infinite upload/download, delivering wifi services is no longer a big cost item for the place.
• Enterprises should have an open guest network, allowing guests to get onto the Internet without access to the enterprise network obviously.
• Airports, train stations and other public places should be equipped with wifi connections. Those connections should be freely available to users.

Then we would have an environment where we can work in the cloud. So, the cloud revolution is as much a “connectivity revolution” as a “datacenter revolution.

However, we are talking about ways to optimize the datacenter, to run it at lower costs all the time, but have a tendency to forget about the connectivity. I can’t understand why? Any idea?