Around the World in a Split Second – Communication Fixed and Mobile

Sometimes when I reflect on how and with whom I communicate in a single day I am truly amazed at how fixed and mobile communication networks have so much internationalized my life that time and place only seems limited by different time zones.

Myself, I was in Germany today and here's the people and their countries of residence I communicated with:

  • Sent an e-mail to one of my readers to Korea who had a question on a reference in my recent book
  • Received an e-mail from a friend in Australia who wanted to have my view on the state sponsored fiber deployment for a country wide high speed network.
  • I chatted with a friend living near Rome in Italy
  • Had lunch at an Italian restaurant owned by a "real" Italian
  • Arranged an ad-hoc meeting at a company in Germany nearby while in the car
  • In the afternoon, I called someone already driving home in Germany to arrange a telephone conference for the next day.
  • Ordered train tickets from the French railways via the Internet for an upcoming trip to Holland
  • Listened to a classical music radio station from the US via the Internet
  • Answered an e-mail from a German reader of my blog
  • Received an e-mail from a friend in the US with a thank you
  • Transferred some money from Germany to Austria
  • Received an e-mail from the UK
  • Read my blog roll via Google Reader based in the US, forget to write down from which countries the blog entries came.
  • Received some travel information from an airline based in Ireland
  • Met with Swiss friend working in Germany and living in France
  • Wrote this blog entry with Typepad, servers probably located in the US
  • And finally, my blog was read today (so far) by people in 67 countries

And all conversations / e-mails / IM / Internet browsing was done wirelessly of course, via Wi-Fi, GSM, UMTS, etc. from the notebook, the mobile smartphone and a plain old DECT cordless phone depending on time of day and location 🙂