|
|
|
|
Technology Today November 2000 Travels and Email Staying
connected while on the road has always been foremost in my thinking when I have
been traveling (besides the scenery, food, late hours, museums, shops, and the
like). So this year, when I took a trip to China, I had a lot to think about as
to what to carry and how to stay connected. The laptop was certainly out of the
question. I was going to have enough trouble staying under the 20 Kilogram limit
as it was and I really didn’t like the idea of taking another 5K (10 pounds)
of stuff with me. The other problem of carrying a notebook computer, besides
wondering if the power supply will get fried with the strange current and
electricity, was the phone connections. I have discovered that in some foreign
lands, the connection from the wall to the telephone (and hence to my computer)
have been quite different to say the least. In fact, some places in the world
have never seen an RJ45 jack. Now granted, you can stop by your friendly travel
store or www.mobileplanet.com, one of my favorites, and find all sorts of
connection devices. The problem is that many times, a dial tone is not a dial
tone. And in my case, when I start to hear someone speaking in Chinese on the
other end, not only do you have to wait to see if it is Mandarin, Cantonese or
some other dialect, just like in this country, they often speak so fast you have
missed already what they were saying. And, did I mention that the cost of
overseas calls from China can be quite pricey! An
aside, if you are traveling overseas and it really doesn’t matter which
direction you are going in, the cheapest way to call home is to use a phone
card. Now phone cards that you find overseas are quite different than what we
have here. Most of the phone cards we see here in the states are the long
distance variety or to give you extra minutes on your cellular phones. And the
way they work is you dial an 800 number to connect, dial the number you want to
call, then dial the calling card or phone card number and the system from who
ever you use for the calling card keeps track of your minutes available and
time. This means you will usually dial an average of 30 or so numbers to make
the call. Overseas, people tend to make far more calls to other countries and so
what they buy is a phone card that has a chip in it to keep track of the
minutes. You use a telephone that uses the cards and as soon as you insert the
card, it tells you how much money is left (fortunately in English for nearly
every card I have used), and you simply dial away. In China, I would dial the
country code 001, the area code 317, and my home number for a total of 13
digits. While I am on the call, I can see the amount of money in the card
decrease, and unfortunately, for an overseas call to the USA, decrease rather
quickly to the tune of around $2 per minute. What you hear in the USA about
making phone calls from hotel rooms is double overseas. It can be very expensive
and if you have to plug in a computer to try it a half dozen times before you
connect to what ever service you are trying to connect to, it can get very
expensive. One hotel I was at charged $5 just to make the phone call, $3 per
minute after that, plus a 15% or more “service charge” on the total bill.
Needless to say, I never make calls from hotel rooms when traveling and the
times that I do take my computer on a trip with me here in the USA, the first
thing I do is to check with the hotel as to the rates for local or 800 calls. In
the states it is much easier because usually the local call might cost you $1 or
so. In the Far East, it is not uncommon to not only pay for a local connection
call, but to also pay by the minute. And speaking of who to call, if you still
are thinking of taking your computer to connect with while on the road overseas,
you first might look into who you are going to call there. Does your Internet
service have an overseas connection or are you going to have to call long
distance to the states? And forget about the 800 numbers, they only work in the
United States and sometimes in Canada. One
lady in our group did bring her laptop with her and the only place she was able
to use it was in Vancouver to connect for her emails. Other than that, they had
a good paperweight in the suitcase. Part of that problem is the lack of local
access numbers for the Internet provider. AOL does a very good job and has
numbers in some pretty amazing places but watch out for the local surcharges.
Also, you had better figure out what cities you will be in and check the local
access numbers before you leave. So,
what I did and I recommend it is to find the Internet cafes and business offices
of hotels. It seems that many of the major hotels now have business offices to
send faxes and the like and they are starting to include a computer or two for
Internet access and emails. And it works great. Mostly. First of all, costs were
quite reasonable for the entire trip ranging from a low of $6 per hour in Tibet
to $25 in a very high class hotel in Beijing. Access speeds ranged from 28.8 all
the way to high speed DSL service in Hong Kong. There
are a couple of things you need to know and do before using these centers
though. First is to find out whether you have an Internet based email provider.
My old Internet Indiana was very typical of most local internet providers in
that they give you a POP3 mail setup to use with an email program like Eudora,
Outlook, and the like. What that means is that I dial into Internet Indiana,
fire up my email program, and tell it to send and receive mail, which it
downloads to my email program. When you are traveling on the road, this will not
work because when you connect to the Internet, you are connecting to whatever
service is provided for you by the business center or Internet café. So what
you need to use is an internet based email system like Hot Mail, Briefcase, USA
Net, Yahoo mail, and the like. What they all have in common is that to access
your mail, you simply fire up a browser like Netscape or Microsoft Internet
Explorer and go to www.hotmail.com or whatever www mail program you are using.
Then it doesn’t matter at all where you are coming in from. And it
works great. Probably the only thing I would recommend here is that you look for
the box to check when entering your name and password to increase security and
expire all pages so that the next person that sits down at the computer cannot
simply hit the back button to see what you are writing and to who. America
Online (AOL) is a different type of animal but it can work just as well. When
you get the browser in front of you, simply go to www.aol.com and you can enter
in as either a “guest” or put in your own screen name and password. You will
then have access to your mail and address book. Finally,
to get back to my old Internet Indiana, now Skyenet, ISP (Internet Service
Provider), they and many others have web based email available to you if you are
traveling. Again, when you get the browser, I would go to www.in.net, bring up
the home page, and see a link to web based email so I can check my email again
while on the road. Something
else to think about when doing email on the road is that if you are using a web
based email already, you have your address book online. If you find that you
can’t get to your email when traveling, probably you should print off the
address listing to take with you. Also, signing up for email from places like
USA.net, hotmail, Yahoo and the like can be quick and easy. In fact, I mention
USA.net because when I am finished traveling, I simply tell it to forward any
mail it gets back to my home email provider. Just be sure that when you hit the
road, to stop the forwarding of email otherwise you won’t see any at all.
Another thing to consider is that overseas phone lines can be quite
primitive at times and so you may get disconnected a lot, I certainly did. If
you are sending very long messages, you might want to make a copy to the
clipboard or notepad just incase it does not go through. Another problem I ran
into was power outages, one time, just after I hit send, the entire center goes
black. These are things to think about when you are contemplating taking your computer with you so you can stay in touch and in fact, I have found that it works very well with out my laptop with me and so on major trips, I just leave the laptop home. Happy traveling. Short
Takes So
have you gone wireless yet? It certainly seems that half the world has. I could
not believe how many people in China are connected to the cellular/digital
world. It gets confusing and from what I am seeing for us here in Indianapolis,
it will only get worse as it gets better. While the first generation of portable
phones was primarily cellular types, you were either in or out of service and
paying for every minute at a very high rate. It has been 10 years since I first
started to haul around a bag phone and my, has it all changed. The problem with
the changes is that as I have seen a global market for these phones, we in
Indiana are just getting into what is available. Sprint PCS first lured me in
with their CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) technology because you could
actually hear who you were talking to like they were next door. When technology
works it is wonderful. The problem is that it is not compatible with TDMA (the T
standing for Time which is from AT&T) or GSM, (Global System for Mobile
communications) the most widely used digital system in Europe, which is based on
TDMA. And naturally, none of the three systems can be used by the same phones.
It used to be that when you buy a phone for your home or office, it stays with
you until you die, not so with digital phones as I am working on my sixth and
discovered that it has none of the neat features of the internet and web that I
expected to use them for. Another story, another phone. What
we are going to see soon is a new stage in this technology that will muddy the
waters even more. CDMA 2000 is an upgrade to CDMA (both patented by Qualcomm if
you think this is leading somewhere). What CDMA 2000 does is to give you data
rates up to 307Kbps but is still not compatible with anything else. AT&T
will be coming out with something called GPRS (General Packet Radio Service)
that will enhance TDMA and GSM data services up to about 115Kbps. But these are
only the stepping stones to what they call the 3rd Generation of
wireless services. Qualcomm will be coming out with their CDMA 2000 2X to
provide data services as fast as 2Mbps. Because Qualcomm has such a large lead
in the North American market, look for this to do well with players like Sprint,
Verizon, and Bell Mobility. However, W-CDMA (Wideband CDMA) is the competitor
coming out of Europe as a standard for upgrading TDMA and GSM. Since this
technology has the blessing of the ITU (International Telecommunications Union)
the chief standards maker for the rest of the world, look for it to become the
main standard worldwide except for the USA. And finally, AT&T, not to be
outdone, will be pushing their own 3rd generation technology called
EDGE, basically Enhanced TDMA, to deliver speeds up to 2Mbps. Predictions are
that EDGE will pretty well stick with AT&T since Qualcomm has a huge market
already in the USA and W-CDMA will become the standard for the rest of the
world. How much of an inroad into the United States will the W-CDMA make we will
just have to wait and see but certainly, look for tons more features on your new
digital phone. What
does this mean to all of us, to be honest, not much unless you might be
traveling overseas and want to use your digital phone there?
If you are changing phones as quickly as I am, it might not matter much
what standard we use since we are not looking for a rollout of these
technologies until the year 2003. But three years can go quickly. Robert Sanborn -------------------------------------- Robert Sanborn is an Independent Personal Computer Consultant, and the Program Chairman for the Indianapolis Computer Society. Reach him through the net at sansoft@in.net Nov. 2000 |
|
Copyright © 1999 - 2012
PC Lifeline
|