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Internet Access While Traveling Outside U.S.?
awgy writes "I will be traveling to Germany and France soon, and have been looking for a way to dial-up with my laptop while overseas so as to update a journal, post pictures, etc. Is it best to find a regional ISP, or go with a big, international provider? Any catch-alls about European ISPs versus American ISPs? Who would you recommend, and what advice would you give?"
ATT Global net... they prive dialup access in most of the countries
AT & T global. accept no substitutes.
they are the only one i found for virtually all the countries i have travelled to.
expensive as hell though.
Global, reliable and fairly inexpensive....
there is no better way to go, they have more pop sites world wide then anyone I can think of...and they have then in places you wouldn't even expect.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
There are a lot of providers in Germany that support pay-per-call (i.e. you don't have a login, you just dial into a special number and the charge, a few cents per minute, appears on the phone bill). I don't know though if it is possible to use this from a Hotel, but if you stay with friends, it is probably the easiest and cheapest way to go.
MSN is one of the ISPs that offers this. Here is a directory of others with price comparisons: http://de.dir.yahoo.com/Computer_und_Internet/Inte rnet_und_WWW/internettarife/
France and Germany have some free access providers, courtesy of emailaddresses.com:
Germany: Comundo and Germany.net
France: Free.fr, Freesurf, Liberty Surf, WorldOnline
If I weren't nailed to the penis, I'd be pushing up the daisies!
A few years ago I investigated global ISPs for my employer. The only one I could find then was ATT GlobalNet (in those days it was called IBM GlobalNet).
One caveat: make sure you get an account where you are registered as "traveling user". Otherwise the roaming charges can be quite high.
Other than that: local dial-in numbers all over the world, no busy tones, no dropped connections.
MSN 8: Now Microsoft even has bugs in their ad campaigns.
Use their POP finder to seek out dial up access points for wherever you may be going.
I've used both UUNet and AT&T across the globe, both have alot of access numbers but I usually find that I get faster dialup speeds with UUNet than with AT&T Global.
Can't beat the good ol' USA!
Internet access isn't nearly as cheap in many European countries.
I'm proud to be an American! Where the Internet access is (almost) free!
--The Rest of the World
Try IPass. They basically repackage access from ISPs all over the planet, you can get a decent cheap rate.
IPass is not an ISP, but if you navigate their web page you can sign up with an ISP that uses IPass, so you then have access to the entire IPass POP collection.
i2Roam is an ISP that works with IPass, for $100 you can get lifetime service, then you just pay for usage. This means if you go six months without using it, you pay zero. Or, you can pay $5/month plus usage.
See i2Roam's cost page for a sampling of how much it costs in various world cities.
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
I spent several weeks in a German hotel, using an IBM ISP account with a local number. To my surprise, the hotel charged me about $600 in fees for an average of 15 minutes per day over 7 weeks.
Americans are used to unlimited flat rate local calls, but in Germany I believe all calls are charged per minute. The hotels also add a hefty fee on top of that.
AOL, MSN, and Compuserve all have dialup acces across western europe. I've used them in Germany and France before. I'm not sure which other US ISP's have offer service in europe
Do you really need your laptop? If not, don't bring it.
I spent three months hitchhiking and backpacking around Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Spain and Germany. Unless you're in really small towns, it should be very easy to find an internet cafe. I kept an online journal, kept up with my email, etc. And I never had to deal with the hassle of a laptop (do you really trust your hotel room/tent to be safe? If not, do you really want to lug the laptop everywhere you go?).
On the other hand, I also brought a Handspring Visor along. Smaller than a laptop, but useful for typing up journal entries anywhere and uploading them to the online journal later.
Another side note: if you'll be going to a few different countries, make sure you have power adapters for each.
Trust me, you want to avoid the hassle of a laptop if you can.
-Henri
AOL has a large global network BUT international access numbers are NOT supported with the current AOL software under Windows NT/2000/XP. I repeat -- Win NT/2000/XP does NOT support this. NOWHERE in the documentation or web site is this mentioned!
I have no idea why this silly restriction exists, but it does.
I found this out the hard way, when I was travelling in Malaysia, I had to get online at night, and I had an AOL account. I called AOL tech support (toll call) and then they mentioned it to me. Since I had to get online for urgent business, I was forced to make an international charge call to a AOL access number in the US, and wound up costing me about $100 in phone charges.
You can call AOL international tech support at 703-264-1184 to verify this.
You have been warned.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
get a WLAN card, and use public and/or open corporate networks. May be a cheap solution :)
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Germany has long-distance providers much like the US's 10-10-xxx prefix that allows you to make international calls for *very* cheap rates. The number I had (sorry, it was 18 mos ago, don't know what it was) cost me 3 cents/minute. I considered my usage and compared that to what I'd pay for local call charges or for a German/global ISP and it was the cheaper solution. UK has similar providers (I've also got 3c/minute to the US here) and they're advertised all over the tube here in London. I'm sure France would have the same thing. Anyway, you might want to look into that.
Of course, you need to have a number to charge the calls to... this probably won't work from a hotel. If you're in a hotel, you could check out the phone cards from http://www.worldphonecard.com/
A few minutes of Google searching will reveal free ISPs in many European countries. That's not your real problem. Your real problem is that if you visit 4 different European countries, you will probably need 3 different phone jacks. Do you really need your laptop? Why not use a free web-based email service like Yahoo or even Hotmail, then you can check and sent your email from an Internet cafe. These seem to be more common outside the USA.
I am based in Europe, and travel around quite a bit, including *to* the US. I always use PSInet in every country I go to, as they have lots of POPs, and local calls are often free where I go.
;)
Of course, as most of my friends (ie the people I visit) have broadband now, this is less of a problem