8 posts tagged “internet”
TOKYO -- I had an eleven hour layover in Narita airport, so I decided to take the train to Tokyo and check out the city. I've passed through Japan countless times since I was child, but have never had the opportunity to see Tokyo.
But first, one note on the airport. For the first time, I found an ATM. And a Citibank one at that. That probably doesn't sound like a big deal to most of you, but Tokyo airport is famous for its lack of ATMs. And you need to get cash, because you need Yen, because credit cards are not used widely in Japan.
Going down to the get the express train to Tokyo, I made the mistake of following the crowd and ended up back giving up my $37 train ticket and going back into the airport. My first sign that something was wrong was when I got asked for my passport. I thought "mmmh, that's strange, they ask for a passport when you enter a train station?!" Well, no one objected when I went backwards through all the security checks and gates, and when I explained my problem, they gave me my ticket back and pointed me in the right direction. Very nice.
The train ride was about an hour long. It was not as interesting as the Heathrow Express into Paddington station. But it was pleasant and gave me a good view of the countryside and secondary cities leading up to Tokyo. No wifi. There is a surprising amount of pretty countryside in Japan. It was a beautiful day, with clear skies, a warm sun balancing a slightly crisp temperature (I believe about 10C in the forecasts).
Someone in a suit came up to the train station riding a bicycle. He quickly hopped off at a section of other bikes just like his. With a quick turn on a key, he left his bike, presumably for the day, with little more than a spoke lock. The bike wasn't attached to anything. None of the bikes were attached to anything. And none of the bikes I saw anywhere were. Even in the quiet suburbs of Canada thirty years ago, a bike would never have lasted the day with so little protection. But apparently there was no need for concern here.
My first big surprise was when I arrived in Tokyo. It was quiet. The streets were almost empty. The traffic was mild. Everything was very peaceful. If this had been Manhattan, there would have been an intense wall of people, traffic, horns, and noise of all kinds. Today was like Manhattan on Christmas morning, not a regular Tuesday. Maybe today was a national holidy in Japan?! Most of the people on the streets were wearing the same generic dark suit, white shirt and tie. Maybe these were just the few incredibly dedicated employees coming in on a holiday. That would explain the feel.
There is such uniformity and conformity among businessmen here. That is to be expected. But after the chaos of Ho Chi Minh City just a few hours ago, it was an especially stark contrast. I was particularly impressed by one businessman in his standard dark suit. He was standing at attention, legs and arms straight, heels lined up next to each other, waiting alone at a do not walk sign. This sign was at a little alley street about ten feet wide, and there was absolutely no traffic. I just walked past him, dragging my luggage across the little street. No experience in my life, either San Francisco, Manhattan, or Saigon, would allow me to do such a thing. What strict, oppressed, obsessive compulsive, orderly, fearful or other mind would stand like that at a light? But clearly, I was the deviant here. I felt bad walking past the guy at the intersection, almost feeling I was snubbing him in that act; but I just could not join him. Folks here were kind enough to ignore my behaviour.
Women seemed to have escaped from some of the conformity. They had far more varied and individual clothing. And some were really quite funky and outrageous. I understand that, within groups, there is quite a rigid style. But those I saw together seemed quite unique. I started to notice some diversity among the businessmen. For example, sometimes they wore different types of shoes, such as black shoes with buckles rather than laces, or slip ons. But in groups waiting for the train together, I noticed that everyone wore buckles, or everyone wore slip ons. So even among diversity, there was conformity.
Having walked around a bit, my next focus was coffee and Internet. Actually, neither left my mind after having been offline for several hours, and after having had only two hours or so of sleep on the flight to Narita. I found a couple coffee shops. But none of them, even the Starbucks, offered any kind of Internet access. There was plenty of wifi, but all of it was locked (with passwords I couldn't guess in a couple tries). I've been a bit disappointed with the lack of wifi so far; I expected better from Japan. I do not really understand the logic for this situation. There is excellent 3G phone service, so Internet on the train should have been easy to set up. Internet is supposedly 100mbps quite regularly here, so it should not be a problem to share some of that or provide it to customers. They do not even sell wifi, but that makes sense due to the economy still being quite cash based. Perhaps the 3G phone remains so dominant here, that there is no demand for wifi?
Actually, having not found much to do in Tokyo, the draw of the 100mbps Internet in the Japan Airlines business class lounge (and a bit of a nap) is starting to draw me. I had hoped to send a quick email to friends and acquaintances in Tokyo, on the off chance I might get to meet up with them. But without any Internet, that already remote chance had faded. Being in Japan is always like being in darkest Africa: no phones work, no Internet, no credit cards, few english speakers. I am so much more connected when in China, Vietnam, Cambodia, or Lao.
It is almost universal, the more expensive the hotel, the more likely they are going to charge you a silly amount of money for Internet access. The most frustrating part is that hotels will say they have broadband Internet in their rooms, but rarely say if they charge for it, or how much. Typically, one might pay $200 for a hotel room, only to find there is another $20/day charge for Internet access. And that access is often poor.
For example, I'm staying at the "Swissotel: The Stamford" in Singapore right now. It is a top hotel -- one of the tallest in Asia, with basic rooms in the $250/night range. They say they have broadband in the room. When I arrive in my room, I find I have to pay $19.87 (US) per day (plus exhorbitant tax). And the speed, especially upload, was nothing to write home (blog) about.
Sometimes you do find a really nice hotel, and the Internet is free. Those are sparkling gems. One I found recently in Thailand was the Bel-Aire Princess in Bangkok. At $109/night it had free broadband Internet. It was such a pleasant room and experience, I spent almost an entire day in the room working and surfing the web.
I think the world needs a website that is dedicated to making the hotel Internet situation a lot clearer and more transparent.
Work started in our office at eight in the morning. But before nine, the power had failed. And it was not back on within a few minutes, as had been the case in the past. So I decided to put into effect my coffee shop plan for business continuity. Later we would find out that the government planned to keep the power off until four in the afternoon; this would be one of Saigon's summer power outages I had read might happen.
I designated the day one for research for some -- that means reading technical books (not using electricity or computers). And with a laptop, and an iMac (they are surprisingly portable), we moved to a cool coffee shop to continue working for the day. We got off to a bit of a slow recovery because the coffee shop had to get its power generator working. But eventually we were sipping coffee and fruit drinks, eating some great food, and listening to Jazz while we worked from our new office away from the office. I think the day was almost as productive as usual, once we got going, and I'm sure we all had more fun.
I chose to set up in a new coffee shop called "Squared", located at 5 Ly Tu Trong in District 1 of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam -- just across the street from the popular club, "Lush". The coffee shop is owned by a tobacco company, which did not exactly endear it to me. Although I must admit I did think it was rather interesting that they have a tobacco bar where they will make a pack of cigarettes for customers using a blend of tabacco and flavour of their choice. The reason I
If power failures like this happen frequently, I might buy a back up generator. But this coffee shop solution seems to work well.
O'Reilly has digitized their entire content and, along with some from a number of other publishers, has made it available online and rentable, with a monthly allocation of downloadable chapters in pdf format. As a recent addition, online video on technical subjects has also become available. The service is called Safari. The really amazing thing is that O'Reilly has managed to get other publishers (such as SAS) to participate in a common Digital Rights Management (DRM) scheme.
The fee is about $34/month, with higher and lower price points around that. This sounds like a lot, but makes sense for people like me who spend hundreds of dollars a year on tech books, mostly because they want them available on short notice if they need them for work on a special project.
And of course, it is great if you want books available when you travel. You simply can not buy programming and other english language technical books like O'Reilly's in Vietnam and many other parts of Asia.
So, without this online service, I had to anticipate needs and bring a few select (light and important) books with me. I still ended up needing a few more. I spent hundreds of dollars this year alone shipping books to Vietnam, giving some away because of their weight, and carrying and paying excess baggage fees for those and others as I traveled. I expect O'Reilly to save me the need to buy and carry 90% of the books I might have otherwise.
The big downsides to using Safari are the slower I/O speeds of online information (a book still has far higher resolution and can be read far faster). And of course, I am all the more dependent on having a fast and reliable Internet connection. A fast Internet connection is not always easy to find when traveling, and always costs more. In my upcoming trip to Vietnam, I may end up paying $1000 a month more than I would otherwise for a hotel with a better Internet connection. But I need this for other reasons than just Safari; and Safari looks like it would work in a rather low bandwidth (Internet cafe type) environment.
Back in 1995, I threw together a quick extrapolation forecast of the number of users on the Internet. The numbers look ridiculously small today. At the time, I recall wondering if the forecasts might be a bit optimistic. Single social networking sites like mySpace and Facebook contain more users, and "home pages" today than we estimated for the entire World back then.
This chart was part of the business plan/feasibility study for an Internet appliance called the "Web Spyder". I developed this with C.J.MacDonald in 1995.
Happy Donuts on El Camino in Palo Alto is the best place to work all night in Silicon Valley. Well, actually, it is really about the only place that is open all night, has food (bagels and sandwiches as well as donuts) and coffee, and fast, reliable Internet access. A lot of places I have tried to work have had very flaky connections and often require hours of tinkering or middling productivity when their systems are not working properly. Not Happy Donuts.
When it is 4am and I want to keep on working on my Facebook application, but need to get out of the house, this is where I head. And I find myself not alone, as this is the only game in town.
I was browsing through my Flickr collection and found an old (2006) picture of myself flying to Shanghai while surfing the web wirelessly over the Pacific. When will those good old days return?
Here I am using ANA's wireless internet access on my flight from New York to Tokyo. The only problem is that there are no power outlets in basic economy. Unlimited access was just $20 (discounted from $30 because for some reason they felt connectivity might not be constant throughout the flight; I had no problems).
What's really sad is that this great Boeing "Connexion" service was discontinued worldwide at the end of 2006 according to announcement by Boeing on August 18, 2006. According to the press, Boeing invested $1billion on the system. It costs airlines $500,000 to install in each plane. The US Presidential airplane, "Air Force One", uses the same sytem.
Once again 14 hour international flights are dark, dreary, and disconnected. This reminds me of when Paul Allen's Ricochet wireless network shut down. About three years later, faster G3 services were introduced by Verizon wirelss. I suspect a similar technological recession is all we face.
A lot of people will be disappointed.
I am now staying in Mountain View, CA. One of the first things I did when I had my computers set up was check my Internet connection speed to the same Silicon Valley server I had tested against while in Thailand and Vietnam. Surprisingly, my first results were not as different as I had hoped, although that result is likely due to my DSL here being rather low end (probably the cheapest and most basic available). However, I do notice that while I am 96 ms away from the San Jose test server, I am only 16 ms away from Yahoo.com and 65 ms away from Google.com.
The provider in this case is SBC Internet Services (AT&T). Also using AT&T is another friend in Los Altos. Seana, receives the speed results below. Because I have forgotten basic HTML, she helped me include her in this survey of the area. She only pays $14.95 a month and beats the free google service by far. /:0) At least, she likes to think so, since she works for Yahoo! [ed: she made me write it :-)]
But, a friend, C.J., (in Brisbane, forty miles north) gets much faster connections to the San Jose server. In fact, he gets more than ten times the download speed, and more than twice the upload speed from the same ISP using the same DSL technology.
In fact, C.J. made the excellent point that my local provider was so poor that I may as well use Google's free wifi. I switched to that and found that download speeds were much better (almost a megabit per second), but download speeds were even worse. For browsing the web, but not voip or downloading, Google was actually a superior option with close to a megabit per second downloads although just 200kbs uploads.
