Jason Snell’s Notes From a Road Trip

Jason Snell, reporting from an 11-day family road trip:

Two of the three places we’ve stayed on this trip have been rentals, rather than hotels. (They’re mostly ski condos repurposed for the summer months.) Both of them advertised Wi-Fi as a feature, but that’s an incredibly vague concept that can encompass a lot of different experiences. The first place was connected to the Internet via DSL, which is quite slow, and the connection was unreliable on top of it. The second place offered cable internet, at pretty fast speeds, but once again the Internet seems to keep dropping and then resuming. The Wi-Fi at the hotel was fast and reliable, which isn’t a given.

In the meantime we’ve blown through a giant chunk of our cellular data allotment for the month. Oh well. Life on the road.

He’s got a lot of good observations about the changing state of what he travels with (he took no Mac on this trip, which would make me feel naked) but this bit about internet access matches my experience as well. I almost solely rely on cellular networking while traveling nowadays. This, rather than using Wi-Fi at home, is mostly what I was talking about when I linked to that XKCD comic on Wi-Fi vs. cellular a few weeks ago.

★ Wednesday, 23 August 2017