All I Had To Do Was Be Productive (Part 1)
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 Karen Ambrose Hickey, EditorI’ve just got back from a business trip over to San Francisco. Nothing unusual there, but two things happened that made this trip significantly different from any other. Working for iPass, you can’t stop yourself from testing out our iPassConnect client software at every opportunity, trying to connect using Wi-Fi from the furthest corners of any airport you pass through and trying out the 3G installation and connection experience on the local operators you stumble upon.
This would usually involve launching iPassConnect, selecting a network and clicking connect. Given my line of work as a Product Marketing Manager, you’d expect me to know at least something about the network I was trying to connect to. I was intentionally taking account of my location and selecting a network that I believed to be my best option for getting a connection.
This is where the first irregularity of this trip came along. I wasn’t travelling with iPassConnect installed. I was lucky enough to be beta testing the Open Mobile Client and given that we were so close to launch (we’ve probably already launched when you’re reading this), I decided to rely on it entirely for my connectivity.
My first stop was London Heathrow Airport. The snow in the UK and extra security measures meant I had a couple of hours delay, which meant “time to kill,”…ahhemm…, I mean, time to use productively, of course. So I switched on my laptop, and the first thing I did was launch my web browser….and noticed the change….the iPass Open Mobile client had automatically connected me to the most suitable network. I was online without having to interact with any client interface or click any “connect” buttons. This was a fantastic user experience.
At Heathrow, there are multiple Wi-Fi networks, and whilst I may know which one I wanted to use, I’ve always believed that any user of our software won’t know, in fact, why would they even care? The ones that do know and care are the service administrators within the enterprise IT team. These folks know about networks and can consider factors like cost, performance and network type in their decision-making process. The iPass Open Mobile Platform allows those service administrators to turn that knowledge into policies that control their mobile employees connection experience and guide them to the right network automatically, known as “Smart Network Selection”. This has significantly improved the connection experience for me, to the point where I know don’t need to know or even have to care about those networks. I switch on and I’m connected.
For some strange reason I headed over to the BBC iPlayer and used their offline capability to download a few TV programs I recently missed so I could catch up on them in-flight. I was thankful I did, as I soon found out that neither the TV nor the reading light in seat 36A, my seat, were operational, meaning I would have been stuck staring at the back of a seat for 11 hours!
Getting down to work, seamlessly connected… (Part 2 tomorrow)
Tags: mobile workforce, wi-fi access
