And the cloud came crashing down.

I am a big advocate of cloud services but recent events have made clear to me that there is definitely some work to be done before we can rely on these services for everything.  Last week I arrived home to find that we had no internet, and worse still no dial tone on the phone.  For the second time in 6 months someone had run off with a section of the cable that joins the village I live in to the nearest telephone exchange.

This lead to a protracted disconnection from the internet that finished today five days later.  It is not until you miss something that you really realise how much you take it for granted.  Time and time again over the five days we had to check ourselves as we headed to the computer to find something out.  This was made particularly bad as this location also has extremely poor mobile data access.

Fortunately the hour I spend on the train each day gave me access to the cloud from my smartphone and all the same information was available.  Indeed now that my connection has been re-established I find that I am completely up to date with what I do, regardless of not having access from a computer for this time.  This shows that the smartphone revolution powered by the introduction of the iPhone has enabled anywhere cloud computing.  At the same time it shows that we still have some way to go making our fixed infrastructure reliable enough for cloud only computing.