Low bandwidth travel eh? Well, right now we aren’t. Bandwidth in the good old US of A is like free refills of your gallon sized buckets of coca cola. Every man, child and service animal has free wifi nowadays, and we are happily chugging across the States swilling data like so much watery light lager. I downloaded half a gigabyte of yoga videos the other day – before I realized that I used to play rugby, and that therefore I shouldn’t do such things. Ahem.

But this cannot last. Oh no. Dark times will come. Papua New Guinea and Turkmenistan will be like deserts of bandwidth, and blog posts will be few and far between. There BE NO internet cafes in North Korea! (or so I’m told). We have a stack of special worldwide SIM cards, two laptops (one with 3G), one iphone, one soon-to-be-unlocked blackberry, a spare GSM phone and a partridge (plus pear tree accessory) so we should be reasonably accessible most of the time. But more importantly, perhaps, we have X!-TREME! low bandwidth experience…

A couple of Septembers ago Lucy and I were on an RV trip in California / Nevada. We knew there was likely to be no cellphone coverage, and we were deeply embroiled in a couple of important transactions, so we took the fateful decision of bringing a satellite phone / broadband unit with us. Now, Satphones are great. They work just about everywhere you could possibly want them to; the deeply laborious process of navigating by the stars to point a piece of high-tech kit at a satellite thousands of miles above you is like finding the entrance to geek heaven; and they look pretty 007 to boot. That said, data was a cool $16 a megabyte (see above re yoga videos). Ouch.

After much expensive trial and error I can definitively say that the lowest bandwidth way of communicating is … wait for it … Blackberry. But no ordinary Blackberry – whilst your common or garden Blackberry is extremely good at bandwidth-efficient email, they don’t tend to work in the middle of nowhere. The full setup, therefore, is:

• BGAN 500 satellite phone / broadband receiver, running on batteries charged every six hours from the RV generator
• Sony Vaio Laptop, again running on batteries, wired into the satphone using an ad hoc Ethernet connection (you can easily make one yourself with just some tinfoil and a pair of stockings)
• Local wifi network, created by tricking the laptop into believing it is an infrastructure wifi access point using the Connectify program
• A common or garden Blackberry, tuned into aforementioned wifi network and happily sending and receiving emails like it is in a tower block in NYC

It worked. It WORKED! I was in the desert. I was deeply desperate. I made the above all by myself, from scratch. I was so, very, VERY proud. I sat back, mopped the literal and metaphorical sweat from my brow, gave myself a pat on the back (see above re yoga videos) and went to make myself a well deserved cup of tea.

At which point, my shiny Sony laptop looked at me, saw it was connected to the internet, sighed, shrugged, and downloaded $1,000 of itunes updates.