I (an Englishman) live in Sweden with my Swedish wife, and we rent an apartment in the middle of quite a large town in the middle of Sweden.

We do not want to be in the flat/apartment in town when the summer finally arrives, so with the help of a friendly bank, we managed to buy a very small torp out in the countryside. A torp is very much like a Scottish croft and basically is a small, red timber house with a large red barn, usually in a large clearing in the forest where, in the past, the people living there were self-sufficient, growing food and keeping livestock .

The house is well over 100 years old and not a lot has changed as far as normal facilities are concerned so it is a case of water from the well – and so on. Back to basics.

Needless to say, our Norwegian Forest Cat loves to be here as well and soon reverts back to nature, unfortunately for the local small animal population.

I was rudely woken up  by my wife’s screams the other night.

The cat had brought her a present in bed – a small, live furry animal.

Absolute chaos! Oh dear ;o)

Apart from that it is a great chill-out place and as we are surrounded by forest it is very peaceful.

However, this comes at a price and that is that only G3 mobile phones will work here. We don’t have a landline as the local telephone company wants a lot of money to connect us – and anyway who is putting in new land lines these days.

But I still need to work here on the internet, so we had a problem.

Last year we heard about a G3 internet connection. I thought, at first that this would be via my mobile phone and expensive but this was not the case. It was in fact via a small USB connected modem.

It sounded good so I went for this and I was soon up and on the internet, out in the forest.

The speed was 3.5 Mbps and whilst I could surf and check mail etc., downloading large files/software took a long time.

Last week the local telephone companies upgraded this to 7.2 Mbps which is more like it. They call it Turbo 3G and rightly so.

The connection is very good now although I do realize that this level of 3G connection is not available everywhere yet.

I thought this might be of interest as , with many places, there is no public WiFi in town – or outside of town for that matter, but for us this is no longer needed as we can now access the internet anywhere (presuming transmitting masts exist in the area). This is progress.

Not quite the demise of public WiFi but interesting perhaps and I have noticed there is a lot of research going on into combining and developing various technologies i.e. WIMAX, 4G etc.so it can only get better.