Staying Connected…

Like it or not, we are living in a digital world. Information flows across an invisible “super-highway” called the Internet, and in one way or another it connects us all. Do you want to see photographs of your grandchildren? Open the latest email from your son or daughter and the photos appear on your computer screen. Do you want to track down your best friend from high school? Use one of the many search vehicles on the web and you may be able find where they are living now. Need to pay a bill? Sign-in to your bank’s web site, make a few clicks, and the check is in the mail.

If you are not sure how all this works, you are not alone. Millions of people all over the world use the Internet every hour, but most are oblivious to what is really going on. A very basic explanation is that information is entered into a computer — be it a web page, email message or online shopping cart — and then that information is converted to a format that can be transmitted over wires or through a wireless network. If the information is of a sensitive nature, it is encrypted before it the conversion. The information is then broken down into smaller pieces, called packets. The packets are routed over the Internet to the designated destination, put back together again and converted to a format that a computer can read. The less information in each packet, the easier it is to send. When information becomes complex, it takes up more space and thus takes more time to send.

Think of water flowing through a pipe. A quarter-inch pipe can produce a very thin stream of water, which is acceptable if you only need a little water (think text-only e-mail). If you need gallons of water you will need a much larger pipe (think of a web page with lots of photographs and other images). If you tried to put gallons of water through the small pipe, it would take a very long time.

A few years ago most people connected to the Internet with a modem and a telephone line. Information moved slowly, but it worked. When broadband was introduced (analogous to the large pipe), it became possible to use the Internet for more complex data such as graphics intense web pages, encrypted financial files, and video and audio files. It also became more difficult to use the Internet if you did not have access to a broadband connection.

For Eddie and me, being connected to the Internet is a necessity. We conduct all of our financial transactions over the web, and I conduct my web design business online. When traveling in our RV, we try to find campgrounds with broadband Internet connection — preferably park-wide WiFi. When we travel by car, we try to stay in hotels that offer in-room broadband connection. Often these features are hard to come by. We have been looking for a solution that would guarantee Internet connection wherever we are, including Travelers Rest, where the WiFi network often slows to a crawl. We think we have found the solution by adding a mobile broadband card to our PC laptop and subscribing to Internet service through our cell phone provider — in our case Cingular/ATT.

The card is a small, rectangular device that fits into the type II PCMCIA card slot on a laptop. With an antenna attached to the card, it can communicate with the Internet through the cell phone network. The service is pricey, about $60 a month, plus taxes, and as with most cell phone contracts, it requires a two-year commitment. As with all cell phone contracts, there is a thirty-day return policy, so we plan to purchase the mobile broadband card in the next few days to make certain that it works for us, before we leave on an extended trip in the middle of February. I will report on how it all works in a future column.

If you want read a more about how the Internet works I recommend http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet-infrastructure.htm and the Wikapedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet.