Finding WiFi
The good news: Almost everywhere I go on business these days (hotels, airports), WiFi is available.
The bad news: Outside of the US, WiFi is rarly for free and the price is rising.
The hotel I will be staying at next week outside of Paris charges Euro 15 per hour.
Recently, I got a UMTS card for my laptop. With the card I have access to WiFi, UMTS and GPRS. The service is not cheap - it costs Euro 40 per month - but with just one trip a month (3 hours of paid WiFi in a hotel) I already break even. My provider is T-Mobile and the contract I have gives me free access to all T-Mobile hotspots.
Unfortunatly, the hotel industry is faster than I am. Some hotels I have been to somehow block me from accessing the local “waves” (UMTS or GPRS) and force me to pay anyway.
A nice site for finding WiFi in 135 countries around the world is JiWire. You can search on their database of over 200,000 WiFi spots.
How do you deal with high WiFi prices at hotels? Pay for it or look for alternatives?
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POSTED IN: Resources and Links, Technology, Travel
2 opinions for Finding WiFi
A.T.
Mar 1, 2008 at 12:52 pm
what’s wrong with Boingo? http://www.boingo.com/
Jean Mercedes
Mar 3, 2008 at 4:53 am
Boingo is a Wi-Fi provider which starts at $21.95 per month and offers access to 100,000 Hotspots worldwide. The top Boingo countries are US, South Korea, France and Russia, with about 50% of all Boingo Hotspots located in those 4 countries. Boingo is relatively small and unknown in other places.
If you are thinking of using Boingo for international travel, be sure to check their list of Hotspots (http://www.boingo.com/search.html) to make sure that your frequent locations are covered.
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