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.

The most limiting factors on a mobile device are bandwidth and screen real estate.

The trouble is that most web content are crammed with advertisements. To read a 8 kb paragraph of text, I’ve to load, and wait while 150 kb worth of content I don’t care about loads. After that’s done, I’ve to zoom in, pan, and maybe squint to actually look for what I want, interspaced with even more advertising. All of these contribute to a painful mobile web experience.

The proliferation of internet-enabled devices and maturing of various wireless technologies means that the number of people that view web content on mobile devices would continue increasing in the next few years. Web developers and designers alike ought to keep this group of audience in mind.

As for me, I yearn wistfully for the web of old, before advertisers and penny hungry webmasters polluted the web.