As I sat down to write this week’s newsletter, I could smell salt air and hear waves crashing on a beach less than 10 yards away from the house I was staying in – a setting I find ideal for relaxing, but not necessarily conducive to work. Fortunately when I began to write it was dark outside, so the temptation to abandon my laptop and sit by the bay wasn’t impossible to resist. Earlier in the day it would have been tough for me to drag myself from the sunshine.

I’ve been away from my home in Minneapolis for two weeks now, and I’ve had varying degrees of success getting my work done on the road.

It’s safe to say that the last place I expected to have an easy time logging on is the beach house in this small Massachusetts coastal town, where growing up we didn’t even have a TV. But now my family has broadband Internet service and a wireless LAN. Access is painless.

It’s a far cry from the dial-up service I was forced to rely on earlier in the week. It had been so long since I’d tried to use dial-up service that my account had expired. Two calls to the Network World help desk sorted out the issue, but still left me stuck with a painfully slow connection - me and the roughly 43% of U.S. households that still use dial-up, according to Keynote Systems. Needless to say, I didn’t spend much time online while I was at that house.

Nor did I spend any time online while on the plane ride to Massachusetts. But it’s not hard to imagine a day when it will be easy to check e-mail or surf the Web from an airplane. We may not even need a laptop to do it.

Qualcomm and Connexion by Boeing earlier this month announced they are testing ways to allow airline passengers to use their cell phones - for everything from making calls to downloading videos - while flying. The companies have conducted test flights where users were able to use their phones to download business applications, access e-mail and place phone calls.

The on-board setup combines Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) and GSM mobile phone technology and uses standard cellular communications to connect to the worldwide terrestrial network from an air-to-ground satellite link.

The trick to providing in-flight mobile telephony is dealing with the potential for interfering with other aircraft systems and networks. Qualcomm and Connexion by Boeing started testing their latest technologies in May and will continue testing through September of this year, the companies say.