by Bill Adler
When Sandy came through town I wasn't worried. If the
power was going to go, I might lose everything in my refrigerator, I might be
really cold because there wasn't any heat and I might start to hate freezing
morning showers.
But I wasn't worried about losing Internet.
As it turned out, the electricity was fine, but I did
lose Internet for three days. That's where my backup Internet came to the
rescue. Within a minute of bidding RCN farewell for how long I did not know, I
was back online.
And you can be, too, if your Internet service provider
waves bye-bye.
I turned on cellular data on my iPad, flipped the switch
for "hotspot" and I was once again able to consult with the New York
Times' editorial page about what opinions I ought to hold. My Internet speed
was fast, too, because the iPad supports high speed LTE data. I had to be
judicious about the amount of data I consumed, because my particular cellular
data account maxes out at 2 GB a month, and I didn't know how long RCN's outage
was going to last. But other than not being able to stream back-to-back cat
videos on YouTube, there wasn't any practical difference as to how the Internet
worked.
Many cell phones and tablets come with the ability to be
wifi hotspots. Hotspots are wireless, like a regular wifi router; or you may be
able to connect your phone or tablet to your computer with a cable. The prices,
data limitations, speeds, the way they're turned on, vary by device, carrier
and plan, so I don't want to get into the how-to of using a hotspot. That would
be a very long article and would need to be revised soon, anyway. If you have a
cell phone or tablet with cellular data, you probably have backup internet in
your pocket.
With a hotspot you can connect your laptop, wifi-only
tablet, eBook reader --anything you want-- to the Internet. Multiple devices
can be connected simultaneously, so you can share with family and friends.
Now is a good time to confer with your phone or tablet's
user manual and talk with your cell phone company about the costs and mechanics
of turning your device into a hotspot. It's much easier to have that feature
set up in advance, than to decide what to do first: call your cell phone
company to provision your hotspot, or call your Internet service provider to
report an outage.
A hotspot isn't just for Internet blackouts either. Hotel
wifi speeds can be so slow that you're often much better off using your own
hotspot. Amtrak, which offers free wifi on a number of trains, is also no
Internet speed demon.
The hotspot feature is one of the most useful phone and
cellular tablet capabilities.
---
Bill Adler is the co-publisher of the Cleveland Park
Listserv, www.cleveland-park.com.
He is the author of "Boys and Their Toys: Understanding Men by
Understanding Their Relationship with Gadgets," http://amzn.to/rspOft. He tweets at
@billadler.
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