Focus On Connectivity, Not Dragging Around Everything Else

by Steve Litchfield / Aug 12

Being a mobile worker before about 2007 required a fair degree of geekery. But, thankfully, the dramatic increase in mobile data speeds and the lowering of costs has meant that anyone can get online, more or less anywhere, albeit with a few caveats.

Tempting though it is to go ultra-mobile and try to do everything with a smartphone, serious ‘work’ usually means a larger screen and keyboard – which means a laptop running Windows or Max OS X. Sub 2kg laptops (it’s worth paying extra for lighter materials) mean that this is rarely a problem though – the knack is to choose a really protective case (you will drop it at some point) and to deliberately not carry around all the paraphernalia you think you might need one day. Manuals, recovery CDs, external floppy drives, adapters, backup CDs, even a mouse, can all be left in the car or office most of the time. Keep it light – the weight of all these extras really adds up. You don’t even need to keep car or mains adapters/power bricks in the case, as these can live in the car as well – if you run out of power while in a client’s offices, the mains brick is only a walk to the car park away.

In terms of connectivity, a USB dongle or phone with 3.5G connectivity and a sensible (multi-GB per month) data tariff is good enough for the catch-all situations where there’s no free or obvious Wi-Fi. But it’s worth noting that 3.5G isn’t yet ubiquitous – in rural areas (certainly in the UK), you’ll be lucky to get 3G and often will have to make do with ‘old fashioned’ GPRS speeds, and this has some knock on implications.

• At 64kbps (GPRS) speeds, many heavyweight sites (e.g. GMail, Facebook) become unusable, so make a point of looking out the addresses for the ‘mobile’ (or ‘PDA’) versions of the same sites and bookmarking them on your laptop, to use whenever you’re plagued by a slow connection.
• Relative lack of bandwidth has another impact – while on the road, it’s well worth disabling automatic OS updates and anti-virus updates, both of which are unlikely to be hour-critical and whose ‘helpful’ downloads in the background will (according to Sod’s law) occur just when you want to get something done and prove crippling to online productivity. Just do remember to do manual updates once a week or so, when back in the office and within Wi-Fi range.

Whether you go down the road of tethering your laptop to a phone (via cable or Bluetooth, both are usually easy) or using a USB dongle for getting online is down to the network deal made by your company – if there’s a choice, go for both, with phone SIM and dongle on different networks. Not only do you then get the fail-safe of using one network’s 3G signal if the other’s is proving weak, you also get the convenience of being able to use your phone more freely and wander around with it without worrying over it being the lifeline to whatever your laptop is doing.

Being a road warrior means being confident in the technology – yes, you’ll have support from your company’s IT staff, but sometimes it’ll just be you and the electronics – so take an active interest in how it all works together and what do try if things go wrong when a report is due and you’re stuck on the A368 on a rainy Tuesday with not a soul in sight.

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