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Edmund J. SutcliffeThoughtful Solutions, Creatively Implemented and Communicated
Connectivity while travelingOf course the most obvious is simply to dial back using the international public telephony (IPT) system. This is always costly and often the performance isn't very good. Certainly not good enough for downloading the information you might want, given the size of modern attachments. It certainly seems in the northern hemisphere that coffee house culture has set in and with coffee house culture connectivity comes usually in the form of Wireless (802.11) connectivity. The hard thing to do with these situtations is to find out who has it and who doesn't. Certainly within the UK this is widely advertised and you usually only discover it after the fact. Wireless connections while travelling In just this manner I discovered a company called Surf and Sip who seem to be providing Wireless internet connectivity for a wide variety of organisations within the UK. I've always found them responsive to technical queries and never had major problems with the service. Be careful of services such as Boingo.net which aggregate many Wireless providers' services together. They make this work by installing their own VPN network service. Often these stacks only work with particular brands of wireless cards, instead of doing this over say PPTP or IPSec. Also note that many of these aggregration services only support using US timezones and only on US phone numbers!!! So this may no in fact be a good deal AT ALL! Also note that now Intel have a website dedicated to telling you where to find Wireless (802.11) connectivity. Another system of finding connectivity in large cities I've found very useful is a utility called Network Stumber. This tool written by Marius Milner allows you to discover the SSID of networks and see if they are in fact running WEB to prevent access. I'm amazed in how many cities I can find wide open network access points where I'm even offered a DHCP connection at zero cost. Thanks! Hotel Ethernet The problem is larger when travelling to cities you are just not familiar with. Throughout North America it is now common to find any of the big name hotel chains to be carrying broadband connectivity over either ethernet in the room or wireless. One of the biggest hotel broadband providers is You can always ask your hotel whether they provide this service. Often unfortunately their websites are not specific. So ask when you arrive and when you book the room. Also remember to bring your own CAT5 cable as they often don't have any, or never of the right length. Dialup-Connectivity There are always parts of the world, or cheap hotels, where wireless or broadband aren't accessible and so the discovery of connectivity is more difficult. For these situations I've started using a service called TollFreeISP. They provide you with a dialer for around $5 (USD). This provides you with a local rate phone call (generally very cheap from the hotel room, or sometimes even free) to an ISP. You should be aware that this connectivity is paid for by the minute, within North America $20 (USD) buys about 10,000 minutes of connectivity, and about half the connectivity in the UK. As you are paying by the minutes used you have no recurrents or commitments to long term contacts. This gives you the flexibility you surely need. The downside with this dialup service is generally you are going through a switch board in a hotel, and so the line speed drops to about 24Kbps and not the 56Kbps or even 2Mbps you might get on broadband connections. |
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