As my time displacement is still not adjusted and my body
continues to assume it’s still in Australia I woke up and was wide awake at 4
am as I was the day before. Not having anything better to do I decided to drive
towards ‘civilization’ until I picked up an HSPA signal strong enough to be
usable. It didn’t take long – around 5 or 6 minutes to get a 150 kbps signal
and 4 or 5 minutes later it was above 2 mbps so I stopped the car, in the
middle of nowhere and posted yesterday’s blog and dealt with my email looking
over a dramatic view and watching an approaching ugly looking bank of storm
clouds. Nothing like the UK on a mid-summer’s day.
The Derbyshire Peak District national park is a truly
beautiful part of the UK and I’m sorry we weren’t able to spend more time there
but the rain was not going to go away and we had a long drive still in front of
us to get to the inner isles for the weekend. The HSPA service is (as Telstra
in Australia promises) “internet anywhere” and it’s so amazingly convenient and
very simple to install and use. In the UK this 4 pounds a day offer seems very
expensive (around $A8.75) but compared to the inconvenience (and cost) of using
internet café’s or the flakiness and cost of hotel’s who provide ‘broadband’ in
the UK it is a no-brainer for someone who is moving around as I am doing and
wanting to use the internet multiple times a day in all sorts of different and
inconvenient places (sort of ‘internet café anywhere – except much faster and
without the smelly peopleon either side
of you and the awful coffee).
Another massive advantage is that my travelling companion is
able to use internet while I’m driving to check on suitable hotels and pubs to
stay at as well as look for other things that might be of interest. (of course
more detailed pre-trip planning would make this unnecessary for most people but
for people like me it’s a big plus).
So we had the normal huge ‘full English breakfast’ and
headed off North to the Scottish borders which I figured was about half way to
our weekend on Mull. Despite the rain the English traffic was going at full
speed in poor visibility on the M1 with the fast lane still being between 95
mph and over 110 mph. In fact when the M1 became the A1 and only two lanes the
slow lane sped up to around 80 – 85 mph.
We checked the download speeds which were fine near any
large town or city but slowed considerably between population centres. I guess
that the UK has so many more major highways than Australia that they don’t have
the same need to have full coverage on all motorways. The speed was around 100
kps, sometimes 55 kbps, on many parts of our 200 mile drive North but quite
fast enough for browsing and email.
When we reached the Scottish border country, despite the sparse
population, the speeds actually increased and as I’m typing this blog in the
very small town of Melrose I’m getting close to 2.5 mbps. I will try a download
overnight to see what the sustained speed is but so far the service has been
fine with the only off air time being at the top of the Peak District where
there was no coverage for our mobile phones.
So it’s been a longish drive in appalling conditions and I’m
heading down to the bar for a single malt (or two) and a spell in front of
their open fire- yes, summer in
Scotland is colder than summer in England.