This is 3G in action folks — your day to day problem solving adventure!
Our team has about 18 workstations with 6 of those working on a night shift. We’re connected via Globe Broadband. Yesterday, due to a very dumb administrative failure, we lost our telephone line — and of course, the internet. And when I said “we lost the internet connection”, that means screaming clients and possible income losses.
Globe’s telephone reconnection normally takes 24 hours. We can’t have 24 hours of internet-less office life! No broadband? “Dial up will do”, I told my self. But hey, we don’t have the telephone lines, too, remember? My only way to make us back online is through wireless connections. How?
Around 6 in the evening, I thought of how I would connect my laptop to my N6680 Smart 3G powered phone. I told myself, what if I install the 3G connection from one of the XP machines and then, try to share it across the network?
It actually worked! From 8 pm to about 8 am the next day, 6 computers shared the internet connection from the 3G enabled phone. We averaged 100kbps. Not bad. 12 hours of uninterrupted internet connection. It probably cost me P240 (P10/30 mins x 2 x 12 hours). But, hey, it saved me a lot of explanation to the client and definitely a lot of stress. Lots of lessons learned: one is this feature and the other — keep your phone bills monitored.