An Australian expat once told me she didn't consider she'd properly lived in a country until she'd sacked her first internet service provider. By that standard, I've only recently started living in this house because, although we've been here for years, I've only just got round to dumping BT Broadband.
The new service isn't online yet, so for the moment I'm having to cadge Wi-Fi off the neighbours' connection. (They've given me the password.) There are several boring aspects to this. The main one is that they are a few houses away and the connection is a) patchy and b) doesn't reach my study, so to get the signal I have to sit on one particular spot about two-thirds of the way up the stairs. It's boring and uncomfortable, and net access is slow, so I can't do anything interesting on the web — can't properly check Metafilter and Digg and my various Netvibes feeds — so I tend to pick up my email, look up whatever things I need to look up for work, and get back to my desk. The results are chastening: I've got masses of work done, far more than usual.
All this is proof, not that it was needed, that wireless broadband is a terrible time-suck; much worse than fixed broadband, because you can faff hours away anywhere in the house. But it's my favourite technology, not only because it's so useful when it's useful, but because it still feels so close to magic: information everywhere, all the time, invisibly.
I often wonder whether my sons will grow up unable to remember a world in which wires were important, and how big a deal that shift will seem. Cloud computing, wireless technology and ubiquitous near-free silicon chips are going to produce ... well, I don't know what. Most visions of the computing future aren't too exciting, just versions of the present with tiny tweaks in the direction of small, pointless conveniences. Fridges that order food for you: who cares? But I don't think increased consumer amenity will be the whole story of a wirelessly connected planet.
One thing my sore bum and I notice on the stairs is just how much the quality of the connection varies in the day. When I had it installed in 2001, ours was the only signal the wireless card would pick up: at the moment, on a good day, I can pick up 14. The connections are contended — shared — so when they are all online at the same time, the speed of the connection zooms downwards. The theoretical speed is "up to" eight megabits per second, which would enable me to watch live TV; in practice, I'm lucky to get anything over 1Mb, which is barely enough to watch YouTube. In fact, it isn't enough to watch YouTube after about 3pm, when the Americans go online and the servers start to slow down — I assume that's what's responsible for the crawl-through-molasses post-prandial speeds. Either that, or there is a roomful of boffins somewhere saying, "Let's make it buffer a bit more, and then a bit more, and then play for about three seconds, and then buffer some more, then hang up altogether, and see if he goes mad."
Right now it's Sunday morning and I can barely get online at all the connection is so slow. But I'm cadging, so I can't complain. Mind you, even with the notional 8Mbps, the connection is sometimes so creaky that the browser will hang up without loading a page at all. Sunday morning is an especially bad time. The mind wonders just what people are doing. When it gets quite so slow, you have to assume they're downloading stuff. Debbie Does Dallas? The new The Feeling album? Or are they all having a 16-player Halo deathmatch, to which I haven't been invited?
None of this would be a problem if the public weren't paying for access speeds that we simply aren't getting. But an 8Mbps connection that, 80% of the time, won't let you watch YouTube without constantly sticking is not right. ISPs should be allowed to advertise only average speeds, not largely fictitious "up tos". Even better would be contractually guaranteed minimum speeds: 2Mbps or your money back.
· Stephen Fry is away
