We jumped on the 401 again, a main highway in Ontario going from southwestern Ontario to Ottawa and the whole way there, I wished that I could connect to instant messaging services, check my e-mal and get some work done, but unfortuately for me, cellular data services in Canada are horribly expensive, leaving me to sit, secluded on my laptop during a long eight hour drive.

One of the reasons that basically everything dealing with cellular technology is so expensive in Canada is three fold: low competition, huge amount of area to cover, and limited amount of people to subscribe.

With closing on around fourty million people in all of Canada, and being one of the largest countries for landmass in the world, it is hard for the limited number of companies we have to cover Canada in cellular connections.

This also makes it hard for any other company to join in. If you were to only get a few thousand customers, even in the most dense metropolitan areas, would it be worth the time and effort to set up an extensive service?

Another hurdle that I feel makes it harder for new entrants in the cellular arena in Canada is all of the regulations we currently have. I am not sure of the extent of such laws, but it has been said that the laws in Canada have slowed Skype from obtaining Skype-in numbers for my fellow citizens.

You would think though, that a country like Canada, that wants to be considered on the cutting edge of technology would work harder to push ahead initiatives to create more competition in both the Internet and cellular technologies.

Going back to my original thought though, I find that my laptop’s use is severely crippled without Internet as much of what I do remains on the web. I have been lucky enough to get FeedDemon to read and deal with my feeds while on the road, but otherwise, I really can’t do much work. I can write articles, but can’t post them. I can’t really research any interesting topics I think of or find via feeds. I can’t see images that are in my feeds, nor listen to podcasts that I didn’t download before I left. (oops…)

If I didn’t have FeedDemon, then I would have to wait to get online to get my RSS feeds, as they are all in a Bloglines account. My e-mail is on Google’s servers. My images are hosted on Flickr. My music is streamed from the web thanks to Winamp’s shoutcast listings and whatnot. It is amazing how much of my life is all online, and how little I can do without a connection.

Anyone else finding themselves with such an increasing dependancy on the world wide web?