Wireless Data Desert

So we all have wireless wide area connectivity, right? Well... most of the time this is true. At least when we do not leave the home country. Going abroad is (still) a different story. "G" in GSM stands for "Global". The idea behind was to have a phone that works in every country. And more or less this vision has been fulfilled, when it comes to voice calls. SMS messages are not too far behind, but I do remember just a few years ago going to the US would result in very unreliable SMS service. I was always supposed to send an SMS home when landed. Unfortunately they were not always delivered on time. I mean - today it is probably not an issue, since service providers have polished their roaming agreements and network interconnects, so they really work. But in 2005 I happened to send a couple of SMS messages and they were delivered some three weeks later. Of course SMS is a store - and - forward messaging, so likely messages are stroed somewhere in transit and once in a while when a forwarding thread on SMSC stops polling the queue and is later restarted by a system administrator, it finally delivers. SMSes have also this nice feature of delivery reports (something iPhones do not support), so you may be notified of successful delivery.

Unfortunately it is all still very different when it comes to mobile data roaming. First, you may just use your primary mobile data device (a phone or a modem) with your default SIM card in it. The easiest way to go. You land in a foreign city and likely your device will connect to your home network's APN. From my experience chances are 60% or higher. So there still is the 40% (guesstimate) failure rate. For various reasons foreign GPRS systems may not be willing to accept your attempt of creating a data session. It is not even clearly indicated, just when you try a data application (email or Web browser) you will fail to connect. Very often it helps to manually select the service provider. Should T-Mobile not work, select Vodafone or Orange or something else... chances are you will finally get through. Lucky! Really? The reality check comes when you get a bill. What is usually charged at flat monthly rate, suddenly appears extremely expensive. $1,50 for 100kB. Separate charge for uplink and downlink. So the tiniest data session will cost you around $3. Ten email attempts a day? $30. A fortnight holidays? $420... just for email... Did you know that? OK, regulators in the EU are working on it, we can get the prices down now by 75%. But this is still expensive. With average HSDPA you can still be able to transmit Internet packets at a rate of $1 per second...

So is there a workaround? A cure? Definitely not a hotel rate of $20 a night for WiFi. But look what you have at home. $20 usually buys you a monthly access to mobile data network. You can have that on prepaid service too... In Poland PLAY offers 1GB starter for 20PLN which is around $6. Go to the store and get yourself a prepaid data SIM card. Which store you ask? That is the difficult part. Martin Sauter (the author of recently published Beyond 3G - Bringing Networks, Terminals and the Web Together: LTE, WiMAX, IMS, 4G Devices and the Mobile Web 2.0 maintains a very useful database of prepaid data offers here. It is very helpful. Preparing for the trip, I visit Martin's site and print hard copies of how-to's related to mobile data service providers in the country of my destination. Why hard copies? Because you cannot rely on the Internet when you do not have Internet access...:) Sometimes, however, even this plan fails. I have just read the recent blog post by Martin, suggesting things do not necessarily work as advertised. He later reported via Twitter, he finally succeeded connecting. So with some extra effort, there really is a workaround... I am following his directions now in preparation for skiing holidays in Austria. We will not have WiFi in the apartment, so I will be looking for Austrian prepaid data cards. of course a SIM-free modem helps here. And by no means I am going to pay the mobile service providers the crazy premium for roaming data services. I still have my BlackBerry with flat rate global email as a last resort... It is tough to live without connectivity these days...