Do We Really Need Broadband? Revelations From Being Offline

My wife and I just finished building a new house about 10 miles away from our old home with fantastic views of the Rockies. We’ve been planning this for almost three years and it’s hard to believe it’s finally done. I took last week off from work to pack the house, move, and unpack. We love the new place, but if I never see another box again in my life, it will be too soon!

During the entire week I went without broadband access to the Internet and didn’t use my laptop or desktop computer at all. To my surprise, I didn’t really miss them all that much. Why? My BlackBerry 8700 was with me constantly. I was instantly notified if I had any email to my Penton, eMedia Strategist, Yahoo, or Gmail accounts and could respond to any of them right away. If I needed to look up a phone number or address that I didn’t know, I simply used the BlackBerry’s browser, went to Google, and found what I was looking for. I even looked up movie listings one evening (the 8700s EDGE connection is pretty dang fast). We also use Vonage for our home phone via our broadband Internet connection, but I didn’t miss it either. Nice thing about Vonage … if our phone is ever disconnected or our Internet service is unavailable, it automatically defaults to my wife’s cell phone.

The entire week during the move, I didn’t miss a single call, didn’t miss a single email, and spent quite a bit of time browsing the web. I even moderated a couple comments on my blog and could have made some posts to my blog easily if only I wasn’t so busy moving furniture and hanging pictures (the WordPress admin interface is very mobile device friendly).

In short, my BlackBerry was my phone, computer and Internet connection all last week.

Will I be giving up my broadband connection and laptop/desktop then? No, for now I’ll be keeping them. I still like the faster speeds and better streaming audio/video. I still need the various applications that I use on a daily basis and aren’t available on mobile devices. We still like the home phone connected … did I mention that because of using Vonage we were able to keep our same home phone number? And of course, any graphic / video editing and web site programming is still much easier with my desktop.

But it became crystal clear last week that I can get all the personal and business information I need with my BlackBerry. I didn’t need print, and I didn’t need the traditional web. As publishers are we considering the rapid expansion of these smart phones in our business plans? Are we developing email newsletters that are easy to read on cell phones or smart phones? Do we have mobile versions of our web sites that are easy to find, easy to navigate on small screen sizes and quick to load with the slower connections? We’d better get there soon because while I believe 2007 will be the year publishers discover online video, 2008 will be the year publishers discover mobile devices. You can bet I’ll be writing a lot more on online publishing strategies for mobile devices in future blog posts.