Away From Big Cities, The Mobile Internet can be Hard to Reach
Away From Big Cities, The Mobile Internet can be Hard to Reach
By Jermy Wagstaff, Wall Street Journal
I’m writing this in my Aunt Gertrude’s house in the wilderness that is British suburbia. Amid the prewar furniture and knitted bedspreads is a sprawl of SIM cards, packaging, user manuals, cellphones and cables — the latest front in my battle to get connected far from home without spending a fortune.
Getting connected to the Web in a big city is relatively easy. Eateries with cheap or free WiFi connections abound. Cities like Singapore aim to cloak themselves in ubiquitous, free WiFi in the next few years. Until then, and in between hot spots, small USB modems that connect at third-generation speeds fill the gap. But go to smaller or more remote places and you can face the same problem as with cellphone roaming: It’s expensive.
So what to do? Well, the most obvious haven is a WiFi hot spot. WiFi has exploded. Three years ago I wandered around a Northampton suburb with my laptop looking for networks and found only hostile looks. Now I’m getting a dozen WiFi signals without leaving my bedroom. The world is awash in WiFi.
But all are password-protected. (I repeated the experiment in three countries with the same results.) This is a good thing. When WiFi arrived most networks were open by default, leaving owners vulnerable to strangers like me piggybacking on their connection, or to bad people hacking into their hard drives to send spam or cyber-attack Estonia.
The other problem with WiFi is that it’s still regarded as a commercial service in its own right. I was shocked to find the only WiFi available in Heathrow’s business-class lounges costs a princely $15 for a couple of hours. A nearby hotel also charges. I would have thought by now a decent — free — Internet connection would be part of the deal for business travelers and hotel guests.
Still, there are other options. WiFi roaming services, which allow you to access local networks using your account back home, are now quite common in airports and elsewhere. Boingo and iPass are two of the best known, but unless you’re a regular traveler they’re not cheap. Boingo’s global service, for example, costs $10 a day , unless you sign up for the $40 monthly plan.
There are cheaper ways to get into these networks, however. If you have a broadband Internet account you may already have access; Singapore’s SingNet, for example, gives its subscribers a free iPass account (tinyurl.com/25zn5×1) with login charges of about $3 a month and 30 cents a minute usage. Still, that can run into money for a heavy user or slow surfer.
Better is Singapore’s StarHub, which offers subscribers a free WiFi roaming package to its mobile, broadband or even TV services. This is provided by the Wireless Broadband Alliance, a grouping of mobile carriers. I noticed StarHub on several WiFi sign-in pages on recent travels. Information on the package wasn’t easy to find on StarHub’s Web site, though.
Another option is FON (fon.com2), whose members agree to share their WiFi in return for access to other members’ WiFi. Started in Europe, it’s won converts around the world: There’s one a couple of streets away from my Singapore home, and one a couple of kilometers south of Aunt Gertrude’s. AnchorFree (www.anchorfree.com3) is another newly launched service that offers free WiFi access, this one subsidized by ads.
But none of this helps much when you’re not in the center of town, which brings me back to the SIM cards on the bedspread. I’ve gotten used to these USB modems that slot into my laptop and allow 3.5G connections on a bus. But while they’re cheap enough in the service provider’s locale, roaming gets expensive (from $2 to $10 per megabyte). You might find special deals depending on where you’re going, and things may change in Asia after the Conexus Mobile Alliance (www.conexusmobile.com4) of seven Asian operators launches its flat-rate tariff for data roaming next year. This, I believe, is the future — at least until the whole planet is one big hot spot.
In the meantime I feel it should be possible to use prepaid SIM cards — designed primarily for voice as connections — for data. Vodafone indeed offers a service for a HSDPA modem that costs about $20 per 24 hours of more or less unlimited usage. Not cheap, but at least it’s portable and would work even in the ‘burbs — but you need a U.K. address and bank account to sign up.
So I started digging around the terms and conditions of voice prepaid cards. Vodafone, it turns out, offers prepaid cellphone users up to 15 megabytes of data traffic a day for about $2. (More than that costs about $4 per megabyte.)
That might be reasonable for people accessing the Web and email on their cellphone, but for someone using a laptop, I found to my cost, 15 megabytes doesn’t go far. Google by cellphone is a mini version of the search engine’s homepage, as is its email service, Gmail. Same if you download Google’s special application for Symbian-based mobile phones. It’s just the basics — none of the flashy graphics, or other bits that run alongside your usual Web page. Other applications, like Seven Networks’ new Symbian-based email software, further reduce traffic by compressing the data.
But while I check my email from my cellphone just like any BlackBerry user, I don’t think this replaces a session on the laptop, where you’re able to read more than a few lines at a time, reread any prior discussion of the subject and double check your facts via the Web before crafting a reply.
For me, the mobile Internet is when I can hook up my laptop to the net on the road. So I plugged my 3.5G phone into my laptop, fiddled with some settings and hey Presto! I was online. But however much I tried — suspending all background activities like email checking, Skype, automatic software and antivirus updates, blocking browser images etc. — the data transfer clock ticked through those 15 megabytes within minutes. Vodafone gave me three SIM cards as a “family offer,” so I bought credit on each and tried switching between them to pump my daily allowance up to 45 megabytes. To no avail; I’d barely started surfing before I hit the 15 megabyte limit on all three. The gap between WiFi hot spot and expensive roaming data, it seems, still needs to be plugged.
My advice? Do your homework before a trip, and sign up for — and configure on your laptop — as many of these services as you can. Or fall back on the tried and trusted dial-up. It’s slow, and ties up the phone line, but it works. Me? I’m getting in the car and heading south.