Dogwash

There are currently three Internet-enabled devices in the house. There's the old mobile, a Nokia 6300 which can only manage steam-driven GPRS Internet access but is actually very handy for checking train times — the mobile version of National Rail's timetable website is actually quite well designed. There's the new mobile, a Nokia 5230 which I bought precisely because it does HSDPA (3.6Mbit/s) and has a quite usable general-purpose browser. (Does anybody else find Nokia's product designation scheme confusing?) And finally there's the mobile-broadband doodah I plug into the laptop.

And they all connect via T-Mobile. And which mobile service provider had a funny half hour this morning? I have no idea how localized the outage was, but I had no voice or data access at all for an hour or so. For reasons too tedious to relate I have no landline access.

It was disconcertingly scary. Not so much the outage per se, but the fact that it felt scary is disconcerting. We're getting altogether too dependent on these contraptions.