Tag Archives: Connectivity

Do I really need this level of connectivity?

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If Linus Torvalds can still rely on a text-based email client as his primary form of communication, and yet achieve so much, do I really need all these new medium of communications that has been offered to us in the recent years?

I have a 12 Mbps internet connection at home through the coaxial cable network, which serves as my primary means of communicating with the outside world, and well, survival. I also have a mobile phone with both a voice and data plan, and an additional mobile line with just a data plan. I have push email on my mobile phone, my contacts are pulled from Google Apps Premier through MS Exchange ActiveSync and additionally, I can also choose to leave an IM client open constantly, all subjected to the irregularities of network coverage, of course. That’s ubiquitous connectivity wherever I go.

I’ve been reevaluating my finances recently, and have come question if the amount spend on that level of connectivity is justified. In reality, I keep in touch with only a tiny subset of the people I come across daily, countable using the fingers of one human hand.

I haven’t made a single phone call for chatting purposes since early this year when my base was quarantined due to H1N1, and I send/receive less than 30 text messages on average monthly. Do I really need that voice plan, and instead, can I do VoIP if I really had to make a call? I could. What’s that mean? I could drop the voice plan and have an additional $30 a month in my pocket.

So that leaves me with two data plans, well, I could just drop of them. Combined with the above, that’s $50 a month saved.

I’ve been using technology with the ‘because I can’ mentality, rather than question myself if I really do need them. If this were an IT department, I would have invested in a lot of infrastructure with little or negligible practical value, and essentially, done a whole lot of bad budget management. Good IT management is not about jumping head first into the next bleeding edge technology, but rather, evaluating and them and getting only what is essential.

We’ll let you no lifers know when service is restored

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For internet addicts like me that gets deprived of a life in the event of the network going down, my ISP, Starhub, has a nice new service – the option to have them send you a SMS the moment the connection is restored. I found that out today after calling them up when the reassuring “online” LED on my cable mode, which serves as an indicator that there is indeed life outside my room, went out for more than a minute.

How it works is that you call their hotline, get redirected through layers of menus until you eventually get to this part where an automated recording tells you that “you might be experiencing some service disruption and we’re aware of the issue” (at least they’re honest), and finally after two minutes into the whole call, you get an option to leave your number.

So instead of hawking over and staring at the array of blinking lights until the right LED lights up, I get to lie back and read while anxiously waiting for a beep on my cellphone.

On a side note, connectivity has been restored now (hence my ability to post), but that text message never came. Maybe their SMS notification system is down too, and they ought to put another system inplace to notify me when their notification system gets restored.

Edit: I was too quick to comment, it did arrive six minutes after this got posted.