[X4U] Roaming wireless options

[Stroller]

On Sep 4, 2005, at 3:11 pm, Wayne Wilkin wrote:

> Someone had told me that there were wireless solutions for laptops 
> almost like using a cell phone. You could subscribe to a service 
> almost like a cell phone service and be on the internet almost were 
> every you are. Anyone know anything about this, thanks Wayne.

It depends what services your provider supports.

You have long been able to get slow dial-up access using a mobile 
phone, but the current generation is GPRS & 3G services which are 
faster and which are charged by volume of data, not by "time online". I 
don't know exactly how much I pay for these sorts of services - I use 
them very little at present - but a UK provider Vodafone recently 
quoted me "about £3 per megabyte" when I enquired on behalf of a 
customer this week. Better tariffs are available for volume users.

A friend recently bought a 3G mobile & claims speeds of 100k/s or 
200k/s - comparable to broadband - but coverage for these services is 
(in the UK, at least) extremely patchy, so devices typically fall back 
to GPRS (at c 48kbps or speeds approaching old-fangled landline 
dial-up).

You can access these services using some models of PCMCIA card 
<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/07/vodafone_3g_mac/> but also 
through most modern mobile phones. Once a bluetooth pairing has been 
made between the devices, the phone should offer internet connection as 
a "service" to the laptop. I have to say I haven't achieved this with a 
Mac myself, and if this is important to you I'd suggest you be 
extremely careful about buying a new mobile phone until you're sure 
it'll work - I'd imagine that a posting to uk.comp.sys.mac might be 
informative, as I think this sort of usage is more common in the UK 
than the USA.

Stroller.