I leave with the laptop, return days later, and perform no manual intervention to reconnect. It's absolutely brilliant.
I connected to a public Unix server and read news, IRC'ed, IM'ed and such like crazy. Also, without being connected to a Pubnix, IRC and Gopher did it fine, the web with patience, and the same with Gemini (gemini://gemi.dev has been really useful to read news and scrap a 95% of unneeded scripts and trackers from web sites).
Usenet was slow on fetching, but totally readable the next morning, and, better, offline.