Staying Connected While Traveling

I once heard a friend comment that you know a real Mac fanboy/ fangirl when (s)he takes their macbook on vacation.

I believe it. While never confessing to fanboy-dom, I might have been guilty of packing up my laptop in my carry-on bag. Not that I am a complete work-a-holic, mind you. Rather, with the advent on on-line check-in, the convenience of web apps like Google Maps, and the near ubiquitous availability of wifi hotspots having access to the internet is almost a necessity for traveling.

When staying in a city, be it a large city like London or a small one like Bath, one of the great things about traveling in the UK, and most of Europe for that matter, is the abundance of cyber cafes. Most any town has a business where, for a few pounds, you can access your email, check-in to your flight, and even chat with family back home. This kind of access came in handy when we were in Bath and my passport was sent through a washing machine (which is another post, altogether). That said, many have conerns over cyber security and accessing your email in a cyber cafe. Thankfully, there are other options.

Today, when we look for accommodation in the UK, one of the requirements we have for choosing a place to stay is that the property provides access to wifi, which is easy for hotels but not so much when looking for self-catering locales, especially in rural areas. And while we have to look or pay a bit extra, we haven’t been disappointed.

To keep us off task professionally, the last time we traveled to the U.K., neither my wife nor I took our laptops. Instead, we took our iPhones. And with the exception of the above need to reserve a time at the U.S. Embassy to get an emergency passport for the trip home, we were pleased with our decision. Less weight, more portability, and less temptation to stay glued to a computer screen.

But be warned. The internet is full of stories about people traveling outside the United States and they take their iPhones with them. And while they used their phones sparingly, a shockingly large cell phone bill met them upon their return home. For many, the reason for this was while they weren’t making calls, their phones were still polling cell towers for emails. And that data adds up, quickly.

Prior to my iPhone, I would simply take an unlocked phone with me and place a SIM card from one of the U.K. cell companies. But the iPhone from AT&T is locked, which means the phone does not function unless an AT&T SIMS card is in it.

The work arounds here are several. First, when you travel, make sure you have contacted AT&T. Have them turn on international roaming and that you sign up for one of their international rate plans. You pay a monthly fee but the per minute rate to call back to the U.S. is a lot cheaper. One suggestion: wait a month after you get home and drop the plan.

AT&T also provides an international data rate plan. But those are not cheap.

Rather, what we did was keep our iPhones in airplane mode. This meant our phones were effectively perfectly good iPod Touches. When ever we needed to access the internet, we would leave the phones in airplane mode but turned on wifi to connect to the internet. We would also use the Skype app to make phone calls. On the rare occasion we needed to make a phone call, we would turn off airplane mode but made sure we had the international data roaming feature turned off (doing so blocks data going over cell network when roaming internationally).

If you really need a phone with a UK sim, you can always call your cell phone provider. Every few years, I can talk them into giving me whatever free world phone they have on offer, since they get so much of my money each month. Take the unlocked world phone with you, put in the UK sim upon arrival and you’re done.

When we travel in January 2010, this is exactly what we are going to do. iPhones will be in airplane mode unless we need a call and we will be taking advantage of every wifi hotspot we can.