Gossip

Come back Aramiska! All is forgiven!

At the end of the final day of the Mobile IT seminar, as predicted, there are no "shock! horror!" headlines. But the Hunky Mouse has acquired a sense of cynical realism about GPRS ...

The idea of the seminar, held in a small resort town, rather than in a place famous for its conference facilities, was to show that there really is no restriction on location today. You can really take your seminar anywhere, and it will be fully Internet equipped. So, at least, we all thought ...

Well, you can't. Not without spending rather a lot.

Next year, we won't rely on GPRS; we'll approach a satellite communications company like http://www.newswireless.net/articles/030320-missing.html Aramiska - which can drive a fully-equipped van, with a dish on the roof, to anywhere in Europe and bring two-way satellite broadband to any location.

Today, just for fun, we timed some of the latency figures for Movistar GPRS in Southern Spain. It must have been busy; but even so, in the morning about 10 AM and in the afternoon about 4 PM, delays of between 3-7 seconds occurred between typing a letter, and seeing it echoed on screen.

At that sort of delay latency, most interactive software gives up and dies. Any sort of FTP software which is constantly sending messages and instructions, and waiting for responses, will time out before a transaction is going to complete.

The future isn't quite as close as we'd like it to be. Aramiska is available online, of course. We did rather tease them, last time; but I think The Boss is in a mood to bury the hatchet with them, if they will help out next year ... I myself may not be so lucky, however.