Keeping In Touch

Judith and Graham live in a beautiful country house in the wilds of Lancashire. When they joined a wireless network and finally got a broadband connection they were quick to exploit its benefits.

Judith has used it to book low cost flights to their holiday home in Menorca, some as cheap as £19. She uses it for online shopping and voip calls to her brothers at the other side of the world. Googletalk has been an instant success.

Graham uses it to connect to his office and work from home when possible. This saves many hours and miles of travelling. Quite often they are snowed in, but it is no longer a worry as he can keep his finger on the pulse of his business from home.

Judith has always written lots of letters to her sons at boarding school, and still does, but finds that they respond better to emails. They were using quite a lot of text messages and mobile calls to keep in touch but since they got broadband they have found that email and googletalk do a much better job and at a fraction of the price. This means that although they are far apart they can keep in touch every day.

Kids skypin'

Whilst on my recent trip to Bolivia, I spent a happy hour in a cybercafe listening to the tunes my twins could play on their guitar, hearing all about their latest exploits and seeing for myself the disastrous state of the sitting room! Impossible without broadband to be that close to my domestic life and my kids whilst so far away at a cost of less than 1 dollar for an hour on what is essentially a video phone.

The shop keeper

Every Sunday, Margaret a rural shop owner and sub post mistress, took her large cumbersome van to the cash and carry to restock the shop - a round trip of 22 miles, and a major disruption to the only day off in her week.

Now, with broadband, during the week, Margaret can use the spare moments when there is no-one in the shop to build her order on the cash and carry website. She can pick the beans, bread etc from virtual shelves in the cash and carry, and on Friday she submits her order online. The cash and carry inform her if anything is out of stock, and she can choose a different brand or a different item which is in stock.

On Monday morning, a delivery van arrives at her shop and unloads all her purchases. She now spends Sunday mornings having a well-deserved lie-in!!