In the early 1990s, I left recession-mired Britain for a job on a magazine in Tokyo. I had expected a shimmering high-tech metropolis, but (like most Japanese) ended up living in a cramped apartment so technically primitive that whenever I used my computer, stereo and toaster simultaneously, the antique fuse box exploded — along with many myths about futuristic Japan. Back then, e-mail was rarer than blowfish sushi.

Broadband was an undreamt dream. How did I ever survive expatriate life in those dark predigital days? Today, I am a freelance journalist based in Bangkok, where, as in the UK, broadband’s popularity has passed the “tipping point”, with high-speed connections now cheaper than dial-up. Not only is this broadband revolution transforming how, and how often, expats like me keep in touch with the old country, it is making it feasible for connected global villagers to work from anywhere on the planet — at least in theory.

The Office for National Statistics estimates that 191,000 Britons upped sticks and left the UK during 2003, the most ever recorded. One friend living the digital dream is John Stanmeyer, a war photographer and co-founder of the VII Photo agency. Tired of his long-time home in congested Hong Kong, he moved his family to a three-bedroom villa set amid electric-green rice fields on the Indonesian island of Bali. Stanmeyer is self-employed, and his business depends on a 200ft antenna in the garden, which picks up high-speed internet with its own satellite dish from a Balinese company.

“Without the internet connection, it would be like living in an Afghan desert,” says Stanmeyer, who has lived in a few. The system is neither cheap nor foolproof. A tropical storm knocked out the antenna for two hours, plunging him back into the unwired world inhabited by many of his rice-farming neighbours. Yet his message remains upbeat: “You can specialise and do your work well wherever you are. That is, as long as you have a solid client base.”

There’s the techno-rub. You can be self-employed and wired, but your clients still want “face time” at some point, an expectation it may take a generational shift to eradicate. Happily for everyone staring out of their workplace window at grey British skies, I can report that stories of thousands of bronzed teleworkers communicating with UK-based companies from the fabled beaches of Southeast Asia are exaggerated.

We all know there is a huge gap between what technology companies claim their products can do — transform our dull lives, usually — and how consumers use them. Remember the headline “Bantu tribesman uses IBM global-uplink network modem to crush nut”, in the satirical online newspaper The Onion? I think of that tribesman every time I turn on my trusty Palm personal organiser. I use it mostly to store addresses and play games of career-stunting addictiveness.

I toyed with downloading a Thai-English dictionary, but then another Palm-owner beamed me a copy of the retro classic game Asteroids — a case of “Journalist uses miniature handheld computer to crack rocks”.

As a global villager bound by inexor-able laws of convergence, I should by now own a Treo or BlackBerry, or some such supergizmo combining a PDA, a digital camera and a mobile phone. I don’t, because these devices are (a) still expensive and fragile, at least compared with my cheap-as-chips and virtually indestructible Nokia, and (b) not well geared to developing countries and their often arcane pricing rules on data downloads.

Like many expats, however, I benefit from the loose laws of my adopted country. If file-sharing music isn’t yet as popular in Asia as in the West, it is partly because bootleg CDs are criminally cheap — £1 an album — and widely available. The same goes for pirated software, which, in Bangkok, even official dealers of big-name brands usually load onto computers at no cost. Also legal out here is what Apple terms “the coolest iPod accessory in the world”, now the de rigueur device for inveterate globe-trotters. The iTrip clips onto an iPod and transmits songs to a nearby FM radio. The BBC website observed that this is a bit like “setting up your own pirate radio station”. How cool is that? Yet the iTrip is banned in Britain under the Jurassic-sounding Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1949.

Fortunately, it is legal almost everywhere else. During gruelling road trips across China, my mate Stuart was driven to distraction by Cantonese pop blaring from the radio. Last time, with an iTrip, he and his iPod-owning companions took turns playing their favourite tunes instead. “It’s a life-saver on long, hard journeys,” Stuart asserts.

The technology that has become indispensable to expats is high-speed internet access. A decade ago, my top-five list of what I missed most about Britain was as follows: family, friends, Radio 4, Marmite and real newspapers. Today, as part of my online banquet, I feast on several British newspapers, mostly for arts, books and football coverage, while listening to Radio 4 on the web. This is my daily dose of British culture, my digital Marmite.

With broadband, I can watch video clips and get dangerously lost within the BBC’s galactic website, particularly the comedy section — a social life belt on visits to Britain, where people always talk about great telly you have missed. Visiting friends and family on trips home is also made easier by being able to buy cheap, hassle-free e-tickets for budget airlines such as EasyJet and Ryanair. To keep up with Europe’s non-Britney music scene, I listen to an alternative Austrian station called FM4 (fm4.orf.at), which my Swiss girlfriend, Natalie, first played to me on her car radio back home. I often browse www.radio-locator.com for similar gems. Several times a day, I stifle the urge to check my own website, www.andrewmarshall.com.

Even with so much choice online, I have British friends who still long for the analogue thunk of the latest Granta magazine arriving in their postbox, just as I relish the tactile pleasure of undressing my weekly copy of The New Yorker from its plastic wrapping. Bookshops have become the dinosaurs of the digital age: you can count on one hand the number of decent English-language bookstores in Asia, perhaps even on one finger. Ordering books online is now second nature, so vital for my sanity that pre-Amazon times seem as distant as a childhood nightmare.

And what did I do before internet banking? Oh, yes, I spent pharaonic sums on international calls to my bank, listening to holding music. You think dealing with your local high-street branch is irksome? Multiply that irk by 6,000 miles.

I don’t dare calculate what proportion of my early earnings was swallowed by phoning Britain. It is an unshakable fact of expat life: loved ones never call you as much as you call them. After all, they reason, it was you who left. This is why few innovations have been more life-enhancing than Skype, easy-to-install internet telephony software that enables me to make cheap calls to land lines worldwide, as well as free calls to other Skype users.

Yes, free. If Skype has a drawback, it is this: you must first shake off the deeply ingrained anxiety that you are running up a truly unpayable bill. My first Skype session was with an American friend in Paris. “So,” I quizzed him, “this is free, right? Like, completely free? Free free? As in not costing anything? Complimentary? Gratis?” My mother, who lives near Edinburgh, installed Skype on her com-puter. She was impressed too. “Free? You mean, completely free?” she began, with the same giddy interrogation that betrays a first-time Skyper.

My mum, a tech-savvy 58-year-old, equipped her house with wireless broadband to help us keep in touch cheaply. My siblings are similarly connected: my Peruvian sister-in-law, Dora, revisits her home with a Cuzco-based periódico virtual. My father, who has remarried, doesn’t even have a computer at home. Result: we don’t communicate as much.

With the advent of cheap broadband, digital photography has also come of age. After my iBook, a Canon Ixus 400 camera is my most used gadget — and swifter internet connections have finally made photo-sharing fun rather than infuriating. Sometimes I post images on the web through my Mac account and send people the link. An English friend in Bangkok takes snaps of her children with her phone, uses wireless Bluetooth technology to transfer the images to her computer, then transmits them across two continents to doting grandparents.

So, for the next 191,000 Brits considering a long, hard journey of their own, here is some advice: you can read online newspapers until your eyeballs dry up, you can Skype until you are hoarse, but it is never enough. The distance remains. Recently, a birthday package arrived from my sister, Jo. In an endearing but doomed attempt to disguise its contents, she had written “Shirt” on the customs sticker. But the package was round and hard, and had a shape I recognised instantly: digital Marmite is great, but nothing tastes like the real thing.

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