I was in Indianapolis attending EDUCAUSE Annual Conference last week. It was a reasonably good conference. Every year I come back and say to myself that I am going to seriously look into whether to go next year or not. I say the same this year. The conference has grown tremendously and the leadership was proud about 7000 attendees. Reminded me about admissions officers being proud of the number of applications. As always, the best part of the conference was meeting some of the colleagues. Some of the presentations I attended were interesting and so were the general sessions. This time, I also enjoyed meeting a couple of senior folks from companies with whom we either have a relationship or plan to.

I would have expected the programming to be a bit more interesting and diverse given the number of attendees. When I heard at least a couple were presenting twice, I was a bit surprised. Panels are great, but when most of the events are panels, where each presenter gets between 5 and 7 minutes to present and everyone is trying to be nice to the other presenters and therefore trying to keep to their time, it gets a bit restrictive. Now, on to the subject of my blog.

I am pretty frustrated by the general tendency of the major corporations to jump on the next best technology so they can take advantage of the buzz and make as much money as they can, that some of the existing ones on which we rely heavily are simply ignored. For eg. there are still very predictable dead spots along the path that I drive from Wellesley to my home in CT where I lose the cell connection. This is the leading country in the world and we still have not blanketed the country with cell towers! However, these companies are busy selling us the latest smartphones costing almost the same as some of the windows laptops. Can we fix the foundations first please?

I distinctly remember that during our trip to India in 2010 how pleased I was with cell phone and data coverage. I had uninterrupted coverage all through my journey. We drove through many small villages and had absolutely no issues. But what impressed me the most was that we were in a desert in Rajasthan and stayed in a tent there where the coverage was so good, that I ended up using my Mac for a few hours to save the photos on Picasa and also post some of them on Facebook. And the cost was ridiculously low. OK, I understand why this may be the case, but I can’t believe that there are still such gaping holes in coverage in this great country! AT&T claims “99% of the people in the country are covered”. Sure!!! Look at the list here for where signal for AT&T drops and compare it to the AT&T map and you will see why I don’t trust the map!

OK, call me a workaholic! I like to work on flights when I am flying during  the day time. So, I carefully chose flights which claim to have wireless (though this costs dearly, I value my ability to work that I am willing to pay for it). Guess what? United flights where they claimed there will be WiFi did not have any coverage. I would not believe a word of what they say here, in terms of how much of their fleet is WiFi ready. In flight entertainment was not available either because of lack of WiFi. Perhaps they should switch to having live performers until they straighten WiFi out. Why would you spend millions of dollars to develop an app for personal device entertainment when you can’t make the WiFi work reliably?

And then, I was in South Station waiting to catch Amtrak back home to CT. I used my Verizon MiFi and was happy to see good coverage. Sat on the train and disaster struck again! Amtrak’s WiFi was bad and unusable. At least it is not highway robbery like the flights, because it is free. On the other hand for the most part it is unusable. To be fair, they tell you that the WiFi is unpredictable based on the number of users using it. I am yet to travel in an Amtrak train which is not loaded with passengers, who all seem to have 2 or 3 devices like me. So, I should not rely on WiFi on Amtrak trains. But, along the path that the train travels, my Verizon MiFi also didn’t have enough signal. Based on my limited physics knowledge, I have theorized that the train is moving at a velocity that the device’s communication with cell towers is being interrupted constantly. My very good friend, who is a professor of physics pooh poohs this theory and says “Please stick to your computing and leave the physics to me!”

I do understand that Amtrak is stretched too thin for money because it is running a loss perennially. Then, please make the WiFi as a paid service or increase the capacity. I will be very happy to do a consulting job to model the capacity you need to support the passengers. Yup, it will cost you some money, but most importantly, I want an assurance that whenever I travel, I will have an access point for my own exclusive use that really works!

I have also had issues with EDUCAUSE wireless in the past because when you jam thousands on people in a general session, capacity can become an issue. However, this year, I did not experience much of an issue. It could be because they planned it well, or that I hopped on to eduroam and did not have any issues. It could be that they had separate access points for eduroam or managed bandwidth in a way eduroam got its slice and not that many were using it. I didn’t care because my connection was pretty good.

The rush to new technologies is all great when you are in the business of making money. But having a good foundation and investing in developing them is as important…