On Sun, Sep 05, 2010 at 03:40:00PM +1000, Rick Phillips wrote: > We will be travelling in Europe on a guided tour where the use of free > internet in coffee lounges is not an option and my experience of a > couple of years ago was that buying Internet time in the hotels where we > stayed was horrendously expensive - made worse by the exchange rate. > > Are USB 3G modems a reasonable alternative?
I'm currently travelling around Europe, and I've been buying pre-paid sim cards for internet access in almost every country I've spent more than a few days in. I've been using both my phone (Nokia N85) tethered via a usb cable, and my Huawei E169 USB 3G adaptor which I bought through Optus. One thing to note: I would avoid any adaptor sold by Telstra, if you intend to use it in Europe. This is because, for 3G data, telstra uses 2100MHz and 850Mhz (in regional areas), whereas Europe (and Optus/Vodafone Australia) use 2100MHz and 900MHz. So if you're going to buy an adaptor, get it from an Optus or Vodafone affiliated store, and make sure that it's not sim-locked. The prepaid deals available vary from country to country. In the UK, Ireland and Sweden, for example, there's quite a bit of competition and you can get some good deals (I rather liked 3's free sim and 10pound/1Gb, 15pound/3Gb for a month offer in the UK, and here in Sweden, 90 krona got me 5Gb for a month). In other places, it can be quite poor (Vodafone in the Netherlands was a rip-off - max data is 50Mb per day on their so-called unlimited BloX plan). As a bit of a self-plug, I've been slowly building up a list of prepaid data offers (http://worldmobilenet.com/). The interface is crappy, and I'm not entirely sure all the details are accurate, as in some cases it's relied on me translating languages I don't really understand ;) Cheers, Paul -- Paul Dwerryhouse | PGP Key ID: 0x6B91B584 Currently location: Umea, Sweden | -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
