Connect with us

Mobile

You Can’t Be Mobile Without Connectivity

Published

on

I just returned yesterday from auditioning at the UPTA Conference in Memphis. It was a whirlwind of work as we saw over 800 actors in four days in hopes we can hire some of them for our next season at Wayside Theatre. Normally we have good luck with connectivity there but this year was a bit different.

The hotel’s “free WiFi,” Sprint and AT&T were all not up to snuff when trying to get work done. The hotel WiFi would magically appear and then magically disappear at random leaving everyone frustrated there. The management spent the entire weekend apologizing and saying they were working on it, but to no avail. Sprint’s coverage left a lot to be desired as the best I could get with a wireless modem was about 10% of a signal that would sometimes fade to zero and then disconnect.AT&T would show full strength and 2 times out of 10 when I would try to connect I had great 3G reception. But those other 8 times nothing would happen.

You can have all the gadgets in the world, but in these cloud computing days, if you don’t have connectivity you’re lost when it comes to communicating with the outside world.

On sort of a low tech failure, I tried to shoot some video using the LiveScribe Pulse Smartpen and a few other gadgets but the very low light conditions in our hotel room prevented anything of quality from making it to the screen. That said, I do have some success stories which I’ll be publishing up later after I shoot some video in the next few days.

Thank goodness we were able to do our auditioning work, because I felt like a complete failure on the mobile tech side.

5 Comments

5 Comments

  1. Gavin Miller

    02/12/2009 at 9:22 am

    Did you not take your backup 2 way Satellite dish Warner?

  2. JimAtLaw

    02/13/2009 at 1:39 pm

    Did you try backing your AT&T 3G connection off to EDGE? If you can live with the slower speed, I find this can help in sketchy coverage areas.

    Another thing – sometimes interference from unexpected places can really mess with your reception. I live near SFO and whenever airplanes pass overhead, it actually completely blocks most TV reception, and my internet occasionally goes out at the same time.

  3. Joe O'Laughlin

    02/13/2009 at 8:48 pm

    Carry an AiRave femtocell? Put the GPS antenna in a window 20′ away, go have lunch to let the system sort things out. Gives 3 cell phones connectivity at the same time.

    Don’t know how it would be for laptop connectivity.

  4. LCS

    02/15/2009 at 7:19 pm

    I completely disagree. Being unmobile is with connectivity all the time because even in America, the area coverage is still minimally small and not to mention other countries… To be mobile is not to rely on any device yet could still deliver maximized results!

    Look how I bullshit :) I like it!

  5. Janet Rae-Dupree

    02/15/2009 at 7:29 pm

    Uhhhh… how do you shoot “video” with a Livescribe Pulse Smartpen? It only records audio. The camera in its tip is meant to track the pen’s motion across dot-inscribed paper.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.