Given the missional focus of much of the MMM audience, connectivity is something that we hear of often. In fact, it nearly becames one of those agree-to-part-and-disagree arguments when people in mobile ministry from a missional perspective get around those folks who were missional but in more connected/mobile regions. Indeed, its a challenging topic, and for many in ministry, its the kind of discussion that makes you assess what you are really capable of tackling versus what we normally declare as a goal of our efforts.

So, its always nice to see in the wider mobile discussion a talk about the real world experiences of mobile connectivity and the challenges that many devices and services aren’t so up-to-the-challenge in meeting. Here’s a snippet:

…Travelling from small town to small town in Devon, Somerset and Avon in the UK, I’ve been keeping track of the mobile connectivity available. We’re not talking a few sheds out in the countryside here, we’re talking towns of a few thousand people at minimum – and I’ve only seen a 3G symbol on my smartphone once … for about ten minutes. The rest of the time it’s been EDGE data if I’m lucky and GPRS as the most common means of getting online. In some villages, there was zero cellular signal (on both of the networks I had SIMs for) and thus not even GPRS. Nothing.

Yet the data speeds being talked about (and assumed) by the cellphone industry, from adverts to spec sheets to product launches, are in the order of ten times faster, sometimes even as much as a hundred times faster (LTE versus GPRS, for example!) That’s quite a disconnect from reality…

Read the rest of The Smartphone Data Hype ‘Disconnect’ from the Real World at All About Symbian

Having acknowledged this, we can be a bit more realistic in our approaches to serving mobile and other connected devices. Its often the perspective that Wi-Fi isn’t used much, but as Dean Bubley and others continue to show, Wi-Fi isn’t just a preferred method of connectivity, its one where much more is happening than what is being tracked. Then there’s SMS – and we don’t need to continue to beat that drum (it beats for itself just fine), but SMS doesn’t require a data package (neither does MMS), and in some cases are more than suitable enough for engagement activities where some text and data needs to be transferred and there’s little to no room to teach someone a new behavior (great case study from our partner Mobile Cause on this kind of scenario). Then you have person-to-person (p2p) methods such as Bluetooth file/message transfer which are usable, a good bit more secure than the former methods, and in high usage (antecodal evidence; Evaluation of Android P2P PDF, Bluetooth Usability Metric Whitepaper). And finally, not everyone has a smartphone – you’ve got to design your services for the best reach, not just the upcoming (because how often is it that you upgrade to the latest capability of device/car/service/etc).

Connectivity isn’t a guarantee. Depending on the purpose of your application or service, you need to pay close attention to the contexts people will be utilizing their device, and the expectation they will have towards whatever it is you built that you have deemed relevant for their intersection of faith and technology.