Will this year be the year we are able to be always online? Fire up your laptop and you’re connected wherever you are?

I remember have a conversation with our CIO about 18 months or so ago, discussing why for document management we shouldn’t invest too heavily in enabling people to “go offline” when they’re out of the office. The simple reason I put forward was that we’d soon be always online.

The reason behind my comment wasn’t due to that current fad in the UK – 3G dongles from Vodafone, Orange etc but a technology that was on the horizon. WiMAX. This technology is effectively like WiFi but over much greater distances.

I just got a twitter tweet from a friend in the US about such a service that has started in his city. It looks like these services are starting to rollout in earnest. Personally I think this will kill WiFi hotspots and (hopefully) mean we soon won’t have to think about online or offline, if your laptop is on it’ll be connected to the internet or via VPN to your work network and email.

There is one cavaet to this and that is if you do business globally. It may take a while to see even WiMAX hotspots when you’re in the middle of say Dubai for example (for those that work in the UAE they know the difficulties and cost of telecoms/networks in that region!)