Networks of Evil

One thing that struck me while we were away is how things conspire to make your mobile phone useless when you go abroad. Just when you are in a place where you could make the best use of portable data access you find that it is prohibitively expensive, if it is available at all. Using voice is out of the question. I can’t think of anyone I’d be happy to pay 85p a minute to talk to, or receive a call from at 70p. So I made no calls on the phone while we were away. Then one night the network made my phone call itself. Which was very confusing for me, as well as costing me 1.55 a minute..

Then there is network connectivity. Charging 8 pounds a megabyte for data access from the phone makes it unusable on the internet. Are there people who can afford to do anything with data at this price? I don’t think so, because I didn’t run across anyone wearing a solid gold hat and looking up things on their phone. From a technical point of view it can’t be any more expensive to provide me with network access than it is to connect the local folks sat next to me on the tram. This is just plain and simple profiteering. Ugh.

So we go back to the hotel. They are happy to provide me with “unlimited” access to the interwebs for just 29 dollars a day. That is around twenty times the cost of my home connection. But wait, it gets better. Once I’ve transferred 100MBytes (i.e. read a few emails, uploaded some pictures and visited a few image heavy web sites) I can either pay extra per megabyte or get shunted onto a capped data connection that is actually slower than my dialup modem used to be. Double ugh. It’s almost as if they have concocted a tariff that makes it impossible for someone to, say, watch a movie from Netflix in their room. Or actually achieve anything.

My experience has been that the more posh the hotel, the more appalling the network charges. The Howard Johnston motel I stayed at had free WiFi. Once I found myself in a very pricey hotel in Las Vegas (I wasn’t paying fortunately) where a network connection wasn’t expensive, it just wasn’t there at all.

In the end we became the worst kind of WiFi leaches, looking for places that happened to provide working WiFi for free. It is always sobering to read all these reports of how connected devices are going to be the way, the truth and the future, and then find yourself in a place where the network either doesn’t work, or is so expensive as to be useless.

Comments

[Steve Cox]

Mobile charges abroad really are a hugh rip off. I always turn of my roaming data before i leave then find a McD's to grab a coffee and free wifi to catch up on emails. You can find one almost everywhere these days! Also, last year on holiday in Greece, the hotel wanted to charge me 5 euros for 5 minutes connection to their bolted down pc. Instead, i made friends with the owners of a very reasonably priced taverna opposite who gave me their wifi passcode on day 1 and thereafter everytime i left the hotel and stood out the taverna i got a connection on my phone to read/send emails and update FB with my photos. in return, i eat there each night and sampled their varied menu! double wammy!!

[Mathew J. Spearey]

I didn't have a problem when I went to TechEd last month, I am with vodafone and they only charged me £3 a day to use my normal contract.

[Tom Fosdick]

I've often found it less hassle and cheaper to get online in developing countries than it is in the West. I struggle to find an explanation for this other than profiteering.
A good tip if you're in the country for more than a week or so is that PAYG sims can often be bought, preloaded with data, cheaply and easily from local providers (most need a passport or other such proof of ID).
Also check out the local NetCafes who are often much more reasonably priced than the hotels - both for coffee and Internet.

[BrianT]

Are you not familiar with the concept of buying a local pre-loaded SIM? I never use my home SIM when I'm abroad apart from once when I was drunk and boy did I get an earful from the FPO once she daw the bill.

As an expat I can recommend Lebara when in the UK. Looking at where they are from I suspect they also sell PAYG SIMs in Oz and are probably equally good value.

FWIW the only time I ever had to show my passport to get a SIM was in India. Mind you, phoning my wife from Simla was cheaper than phoning from round the corner at home.

As for data do that when you are in range of free WiFi.

[Rob]

Yep. It would have been a sensible thing to do. In the end we found ways of working round it, the place we had breakfast had WIFI and so we could do all our emails each day from there. Next time I travel like this I'm going to invest in a WIFI hotspot device in the country the day I arrive, load that up and then connect our devices to it. If I'd done that on day 1 when we arrived I'd have had a much better experience than buying access piecemeal.