Orient Expression

Golden Telecom and the Golden Arches have teamed up to provide WiFi equipment and services in the 175 McDonalds outlets across Russia. Starbucks has long been the haunt of out of work or writers block authors looking to catch up and some work. Maybe the trend is moving away from Half Fat Latte to Big Mac Meals as the staple of the budding writers. I expect we'll hear the inevitable cheery question "would you like WiFi with that?"

It was a joy to be able to use WiFi when traveling from Edinburgh down to Peterborough . Had to pay for it though as I wasn't in First Class. However good news is that now that National Express have been successful in their bid to operate the East Coast main line, replacing GNER, they plan to extend free WiFi to standard class passengers. For a journey like Peterborough to Edinburgh the train will certainly become a real alternative to flying. The company I work for has offices in both Cambridge and Edinburgh with frequent visits required. The preferred option is EasyJet. Today with heightened security, a trip to Luton airport, wait times, lost baggage, delays and a trip from the airport at the other end the train is no slower than flying. Add in free WiFi and the happy little workers can still book billable hours on the way.

Skype took a big credibility hit on Thursday when an unknown number of people could not log in to the one of the most well known VoIP clients in the market today. Take a deep breath and hope this is some glitch in the software and not the limitation of the peer to peer network capabilities. The problem started out as a login problem and there people started receiving delayed IM sessions hit the client. The IM sessions have often been a bit flaky and I often receive a delay in getting them (upwards of 2 days in some cases). Thinking back I wonder if this was the start of a problem that mushroom clouded for them on Wednesday/Thursday depending where you are in the world. They have been working hard to fix the problem and for me at least service seems to be more stable. After a laboured login I at least maintain a session now. At first it was hard to tell as with Skype normally being so efficient at finding a connection I assumed it was the flaky ADSL infrastructure at my end in Thaila