During my trip in South America, i’ve been taking advantage of the
very good coach companies, travelling in the highest class I can,
which normally affords extra leg room and a flatter bed, but sometimes
also a meal or two with a glass of bubbly. This post has been written
on a coach with on-board wifi. I even managed a brief Skype call,
before the few internet users on this bus maxed out the upstream
bandwidth – not suprising, as I suppose that a single GSM modem is
serving us all. The access point disappears from time to time, but my
phone reconnects pretty quickly and my web sessions don’t seem to get
lost.
For starters, my laptop is in the hold, but even if I had it here, in
a little over an hour the batter would be flat. Why, when a coach’s
engine must be generating excess power can power sockets be made
available? An ordinary laptop only pulls down 40 amps or so, so you
wouldn’t need a really big inverter. If they provided even only 120V
or something, that would still slowly charge a laptop or mobile and
would encourage me to bring my laptop on board. Yes, there’s a cost to
such a service, but if it were offered, I’d be prepared to pay a
premium on my ticket. I’m normally travelling alone, so medium to long
coach journeys would let me get some work done, even if I had no
internet connection.
And don’t just say ‘buy a netbook’. My efficiency on a small screen
and keyboard would plummet. I certainly won’t tell you how long it
took to type this short post on my mobile!