In 2002, I released Mobilize Yourself!: The Microsoft Guide to Mobile Technology with Microsoft Press. Those were the days of the Pocket PC, Symbian and Palm OS. Even back then people were speaking about how we would have ubiquitous 3G access and that would solve all of our data communications problems. If everyone has access to high-speed Internet all the time, then who needs to have offline storage? Back then we thought 128Kbps was high speed.

I vividly remember being in Hollywood for a conference when a Sheriff’s deputy from Orange County (the county that Los Angeles is in) and I started a discussion. He told me that the police cars didn’t always have a reliable data signal everywhere in the county. I realized at that moment the idea that everyone would have high-speed wireless Internet everywhere was a pipe dream. There are regions where accessing data just isn’t going to work.

Over the years I’ve tried to get access in some very remote places, like Montana, and some less remote places, like southern Illinois. Neither my cell phone data nor the wireless at my family’s home was very reliable, and so as recently as a month ago, I didn’t have access to high-speed Internet in the places I go regularly.

I recently was working with a global client where we were discussing Internet access availability across the globe – and how unstable it was. That is, it’s unstable where you can get it at all. There are still places on the planet where Internet access isn’t an option. If you’ve ever been to a technology conference and tried to do something from the hotel Internet, you know what I mean.

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