High-speed networking woes
By Jim Louderback
March 12, 1999
ZDTV

So I heard recently that AT&T and LodgeNet are going to wire up the country's hotel rooms with high speed Internet access. And they plan on making it just as simple as plugging in a phone. Well, I hate to rain on their parade (that's a lie -- actually I live for it), but this idea's a bit daft.

First, this scheme will require an Ethernet port on each notebook. Hmmm, did anyone from AT&T do a random sample of Ethernet ports on UA Flight 24? Except for the lucky few packing Xircom's RealPort, I'll bet those 8-pin indentations are few and far between.

Ethernet on notebooks comes in two flavors -- those built into the docking station, and those on PC Cards. Now I hardly think Joe Executive is going to lug his docking station around -- especially with those new "eye-of-a-needle" baggage constrictors popping up at security screening gates everywhere. And even if Joe has a PC Card with Ethernet built in, I'll bet dollars to donuts the PC dongle will disappear before Dallas. Modern man is simply unable to keep track of more than one dongle at a time. That trait has been hard-wired into us since our monkey days.

But let's say, for argument sake, that we can overcome 10 pounds of baggage and 10 billion years of evolution. "Can I help you connect to the Internet?" is the first thing Joe is not going to hear after the doorman lets him into his Westiott shoebox. "Let me adjust your IP settings, I know the gateway address," is the second thing Joe will not hear.

Anyone who has ever attempted to print from their notebook to a business-center printer knows that hotel staffs have the technical acumen of a raccoon. They can't even figure out how to configure a humidifier or an iron, let alone an expensive piece of modern computing.

Many moments of word association hilarity will ensue as Joe attempts to check out gnarlybabes.com. I can hear the hotel staff's responses now: "Gateway? Oh, the arch is in downtown St Louis." "IP Address? I'm sorry, I don't know that restaurant." "DNS? Sir! Are you trying to proposition me?"

Actually, if you believe the press release, the suitably enabled Joe Executive will simply plug his notebook into the "Ethernet based Internet jack," and "with no software installation or reconfiguration," magically connect to the Internet.

Can you tell I'm skeptical? Let's face it, high-speed networking is difficult and our desktop operating systems don't make it any easier. Now I'm pretty savvy, but I've been completely unable to set my notebook up to support two different IP address environments using the same hardware at home and at work. Windows 98 allows for different hardware profiles, but even those profiles seem to adopt the same IP settings.

Even if Joe does manage to show up with an Ethernet port on his computer, it's not going to be that easy to get him up on the Internet. He'll either have a static IP address that will need to be changed, or at the very least, the DNS and gateway will need updating. And I can just see his face when he tries to use his "new" IP configuration back in his office.

Nope, until someone develops dynamically reconfigurable IP -- that adjusts automatically to any network -- Joe's going to remain clutching his single dongle, sitting in his $250 a night analog jail.

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