2
Nerd News:
Communications (Telephones, laptops, and more).
Apologies
We just made our first
journal of the season available and I am sorry I didn’t have a chance to update the
“Update” at the end. We’d had that piece poised and ready to go out for almost a
week but hadn't been unable to connect our laptop to the internet via a hotel
phone or an internet shop. When we
arrived on Santorini from
The good and the bad news is that our lousy weather in the Greek Islands has given me a chance to once again prove a friend right in calling me “Word Woman,” as I’ve been getting my files caught up. That means I’ve had 4 files stacked up. This one and the next (#2 & #3) are both “Nerd News” editions and are about the more technical issues of our travel rather than the sights and sounds. The 4th one is just about finished, which catches you up to date on our travels. Since our ability to connect is tenuous I am going to do what I try to never do and that’s flood you with our backlog of updates--who knows when we will connect again. But all of these troubles let you know that the subject of this Nerd News, the challenges of connecting to the internet, is still very real for us.
Getting online at internet shops & via hotel phone lines:
our laptop, cables, connectors, line filter & line testers.
Finally, Nerd News is Back!
This Nerd News
began almost a year ago as a telling of the tale of our misadventures in connecting
our then new laptop to the internet. It grew large and unwieldy and Bill thought
it too tedious, even for technical information. It has taken the boredom of
being marooned by high winds on the Greek
PAY PHONES & PHONE CARDS
General
Beware
abroad when you attempt such a simple task as picking up the phone to make a
call, especially a long distance call, that the challenges can seem to be endless
(unless of course you are willing to entrust your wallet to the hotel for long
distance charges.) We call
Numbers to Dial
Most of us are
unaware that when we dial “1” in the
You have to look for them but it isn’t too hard to find country codes. Most tourist guide books will have a list, some hotels or phone booths will have them posted, and they often appear in the phone books. But if you know you will be calling another country, it’s good to locate the country code before you need it as they can be rascally to find in a hurry.
Zeros are the
bane of international dialing. Often you need a leading zero to dial a domestic
call when in
Many
countries have a number that looks like an area code to us embedded in the number,
as is slowly becoming the standard in the
Oh, and “800”
numbers: check your emergency numbers before leaving home for “800” numbers as
they are useless overseas. Yup, can’t use them. That 800 number for a lost
credit card, traveler’s checks, and insurance company--they are all worthless.
It can be like pulling teeth to get a toll number from some
US Calling Cards
We have not
found US calling cards like AT&T to be a viable option in
If you will
only be making calls to the
Mobile Phones
Using your mobile phone from home will stick you with pricey per-minute rates. European mobile phones aren’t much of an option for travelers as the companies require a stable, local address to purchase a phone and calling plan and the rates are high once you leave the country in which it was purchased. We have talked to people who maintain their old phone when they move to a new country to get around this problem. The price of satellite phones is coming down but we still consider them prohibitively expensive.
Phone Cards
Phone cards and not coins are definitely the way to go when using pay phones, but even they aren’t always straightforward. We have incredible phone card angst these days from all the problems we have had and the money we have wasted on phone cards.
A phone card is
usually only good for the country in which it is purchased and be sure to
mention the country you intend to call when purchasing it. Some “holiday” cards
are designed only for calling home while abroad, like for German tourists
calling home from
We always quickly
assess if private phone cards are available, as they are in most countries.
Big cities are the best place to look for bargain phone cards. Sometimes a shop in a major train station will sell them. Another good place to buy cheap phone cards is in the part of a big city that caters to African residents (also often near the train station). African entrepreneurs set-up private phone booths in tiny shops for fellow ex-pats to call home at good rates (and without owning their own phone). In addition to renting time on their phones, they often sell discounted phone cards. Occasionally internet shops will also sell phone cards. Wherever you buy, make sure they know you aren’t buying more time for a mobile phone but a card for a pay phone. I usually flash my old card when I am buying to make up for missing vocabulary words.
If discounted phone cards aren’t an option or can’t be found, you can usually buy the government’s phone cards at the post office or at a tobacconist’s street side kiosk. Phone cards are prepaid in fixed amounts, so you have to guess how much credit you need to make your call or calls. If you don’t use up all the credit on the card then you are just out the remaining value.
Finding a private
label phone card isn’t always easy and collecting on the good rates can be
confounding as well. They don’t usually have time of day rate fluctuations, but
they are full of challenges. Our most recent card in
In addition to the potential choice between government and private phone cards, you will likely get to choose between the computer chip or insertable cards and manually dialed PIN cards. The PIN cards have the advantage of being usable at almost all phones, including your hotel room phone and are often cheaper to use per minute. And sometimes we get a much better rate from the same PIN card when calling from the hotel phone and not a pay phone on the street. The chip cards tell you how much time you have left on your card in displayed numbers, which gets around the language barrier of announced messages about your account balance when you are dialing. In some countries we have found it best to have both types of cards on hand and use what ever works in a given situation as not all phones are able to accept a chip card.
And in
Pay Phones
Not all pay phones will permit you to make international calls so look around on the booth (if there is one) for mention of international calling ability. I haven’t noticed this in all countries but it is worth being on the look-out for such restrictions.
Perhaps one of
the most threatening changes to us in phone calling is the phasing out of pay phones
that permit international calls. That may only be happening in
Voice Messaging
In
Just this month
(3/03) we have subscribed to the communication system sponsored by the guide
book company Lonely Planet. It has a number of handy services but the only
service we are using is their international calling system. They claim to have
low rates, but in the 2 countries we have price-shopped—
CONNECTING OUR LAPTOP TO THE INTERNET: Hotels vs Shops
General: Hotel Phone Lines vs Internet Shops
Our 2 basic approaches to connecting our laptop to the internet are either plugging into an ordinary phone line in a hotel room or connecting through an internet shop’s computer equipment to their LAN. Both can work and both approaches have a seemingly endless maze of challenges to be discovered and overcome.
It has been horrific to see how difficult this process has been and that I personally couldn’t have made a single transmission work myself. Bill has done 100% of the connecting and it has taxed his knowledge of computers endlessly. His experience goes well beyond that of the average user as he has written programs for business applications and for years was the de facto MIS director for a small company. Even with his background, he has just barely been able to get us connected, and intermittently at that.
Connecting To The Internet With Hotel Phones
Bill has spent dozens of entire evenings solving an endless stream of large and small problems in his attempts to connect our laptop to the internet on hotel phones abroad. The intense frustration and suspense of “Will it or won’t it connect tonight?” drained the remaining life out of many an evening. As with much in the computer-user’s world, things that seem like they should be so simple can become enormous obstacles. And despite the steep learning curve he has traveled over 10 months of travel with a laptop, he is still only able to connect about 70% of the time when we have a phone line available. Here are some of the things he has learned the hard way:
Before You Leave Home
If you plan on connecting via phones, do the following before leaving home:
-subscribe to an internet provider….and confirm that you can immediately use it abroad
(not so with our provider, AOL)
-confirm that your computer can handle 220v current or buy an adapter
-purchase the following to help with connections
---line splitter for dialing either with the handset or computer
---2 extra phone cables
---female/female phone line gender-changer
---adapter for the electrical plug (we’ve gotten by with just 1 adapter for many countries)
---digital/analog line tester (available mail order from Magellan’s)
(The photo attachment displays all of these except the plug adapter. In addition, it shows the line filter mentioned below.)
A Note About Line Testers
Line testers are important in these days of higher voltage digital lines—inadvertently hooking-up to one can fry your modem. The standard phone lines that we all know are analog and analog is what you want but you can’t tell by looking at them or listening to them.
“Buy before you
fly” is our passionate advice with line testers as they are hard to find in
In
Later this year
we will give you a report on our 2 different line testers: the simpler one we
bought from Magellan’s and the more automated one purchased in
-One evening in Poland Bill finally discovered that the more automated phone line tester was actually blocking the phone line. This new tester has a line protector function built in, so it is to be left in line when making the calls. (Our other tester is usually not left in line.) The call finally went through when he removed the new line tester from his hook-up.
-In
-Then there was the line that apparently had such a weak signal that neither our automated phone line tester nor computer modem could detect a dial tone: as far as both were concerned, there was no phone line, digital or analog although you could place calls using the handset.
Finding a Phone:
-using someone’s residential line is your best bet for a
suitable line but is hard for a traveler to come by
-hotel phones have about a 50-50 chance of being suitable, depending on the country
-using the rare pay phone with a data port adds another level
of complexity--phone cards (we haven’t been able to
find one when we wanted it
so have no experience with them)
Sometimes finding
a phone line can be demoralizing. After weeks of not being able to connect via a
suitable phone or an internet shop in
In
And more than
once we have asked to see rooms in a number of hotels in a town so as to inspect
the telephone equipment and still found nothing usable.
Shopping for a hotel room with a phone is easier in some
countries than others:
-if the clerk says the room has a phone, ask to see the room and inspect the phone:
--make sure it has a key pad (rotary’s are less likely to work)
--if it’s an old-styled system with the phone hard-wired
(instead of plug-in) it won’t work without doing some re-
wiring (Bill draws the
line there)
--check that the plug-in connectors are the familiar modular, RJ-11 style
Ask the clerk now if you are bold or later when you have
problems:
-does the phone actually work or is it merely ‘decorative’ (we
have had several of these)
-is the phone only for calls within in the hotel
-are long distance calls permitted (domestic or international)
-is it a digital line (they may not know the answer &
sometimes its best not to ask)
Getting Ready To Dial:
-use line tester to be sure its analog and not the higher voltage digital line
-ask the front desk to remove the block on long distance calls from your phone
-determine how to get a line out of the hotel (if ‘9’ doesn’t work, try ’8’ or ‘0’or ask)
-select your host country from the ‘modem location settings’
in your modem or operating system software (those take
into account unusual ring
patterns and other local idiosyncrasies--that made all the difference in
-select the nearest telephone number for your provider from
list within their software (try several if you are having
difficulty completing
the call or call one in another country that worked before)
-for international calls, be sure to add “00” before the country code (like “001” to US)
-for domestic calls, usually you drop the leading zero on the city code
-test by calling the server number of your provider using the handset, not the computer
-congratulate yourself on your good fortune if the call goes through and you connect
(see below if you aren’t able to) then connect with your computer
-if dialing with the handset fails:
--reconfirm with the front desk that the room phone is switched ‘on’ for long distance
(often long distance calls are blocked at the switch board—you may have to ask twice)
--confirm with the front desk that you are dialing the number correctly
(usually the problem revolves around adding or deleting zeros)
-when you have mastered dialing up your internet provider’s server with the handset,
unplug the room phone and plug-in the modem to phone line and dial
--if the call now doesn’t go through to your internet the provider then:
---attach both the handset and the modem to the phone line
through a “Y” connector and then begin a series of
experiments, dialing more and
more of the numbers through the handset. For example, start by dialing the
prefix
needed to exit the hotel phone system (usually “0”) with the handset and
setting the computer up to dial the
remaining numbers through the modem. If that
doesn’t work, then dial the hotel prefix and the first few numbers
of the
provider with the handset, and the remaining numbers with the modem. If it still
doesn’t connect, then you
probably won’t get in through this phone system.
-whenever your modem does connect, if you are still listening
through the handset, you need to hang up as soon as you
hear the “modem tones”
or you may interfere with the connection
-whenever you dial part of the number sequence from the
handset, you must instruct the modem not to also dial those
numbers
Sometimes the phone systems are incorrectly wired in hotels (the pair of wires carrying the phone message are reversed). Your phone tester may detect this glitch. Some testers will automatically correct this problem, while others will just tell you about it. Reportedly, the only significance is that the transmission will be slower with reversed polarity, but you should still be able to connect.
Our 2003 kit of connection supplies has been expanded this year by the addition of a line filter. Line filters will filter out the pulsing sound that some phone systems toss in as a way of monitoring line use. We don’t know if such pulses are interfering with our transmissions but Bill is going to experiment with this device at times when he can almost but not quite connect. We’ll let you know in a later Nerd News if it helps.
Rotary Phones
In
How much will this call cost? “That’s anybody’s guess!”
-even local calls to your provider are often charged per minute, and not a flat rate
-it is highly unlikely that hotel staff can estimate per minute charges
-the more expensive the hotel, the higher and more arbitrary the fees
-sometimes the hotel doesn’t charge if we connected with a local provider number
-your internet provider will likely have additional charges
for international connections (we incur an additional charge
each time we dial
up in a new country)
Those are Bill’s condensed gems for connecting to the internet via telephone lines. Here are some of the other things he has learned:
When desperate, try the opposite of what is recommended. Like when the hotel clerk and guide book both say to use a leading “0” before the city code, try it without the “0”. Bill has had that be the missing step in more than 1 transmission.
Hotel phone systems are sometimes hay-wired (as opposed to
hard-wired). More than once we have not been charged for calls because they
don’t show up on the front desk system and once they attributed calls to us that
were not ours. The biggest problem we have knowingly had with goofy wiring was
in
A couple of hotels only had one phone line for the entire hotel so if the staff or another guest was making a call we would get an unusual tone instead of a dial tone on our handset.
For domestic long distance calls in
Connecting Our Laptop to the Internet at Internet Shops
“Buy before you fly” applies to connecting through internet shops too, but this time it is an Ethernet card you need. Our petite Fujitsu laptop has both a 1394 Net Adapter and an Ethernet port built in. Only the Ethernet port has been useful to us as that is what is compatible with most internet shops.
Bill was
sure our Fujitsu had an Ethernet port but when he went to use it in
Some of the problems are social:
-As when shop managers refuse our request because they are sure that plugging our computer into their system will consume their one-and-only trunk line, which isn’t true
-Often the shopkeeper will need to assist in manually entering
TCP/IP settings on our network software to get around their firewall instead of
using the more standard “Auto” settings. But it is rare that the person staffing
the shop at the moment will have a clue about the needed settings. (One shop in
-The social problems are best solved by looking for a small shop with at least 2 or 3 computers and with a curious owner/manager on duty.
Sometimes the problems are physical:
-In some shop’s the system units are inaccessible, so there is nowhere to plug-in.
-Occasionally the cables on the shop’s system are very short. Bill often ends up sitting on the floor, sort of folded and tucked under the table top, while he up-and-down-loads our emails. One Turkish shop owner was quick to offer a pillow for him to sit on. In shops with a little longer cables, he sits kind of sideways, with the laptop precariously balanced on the corner of the table. Bill was finally able to buy an extension cable (the top white one in the photo) so he could sit with dignity like all the kids in the internet shop.
-The presence of security firewalls on the shop’s system that we can’t electronically penetrate
-The use of high-speed, incompatible lines
-Occasionally, the shops use less common and incompatible hardware or network protocols
Only once (in
We were
especially surprised when we treated ourselves to a business class hotel in
We were
also surprised that in
In contrast, we just about fell over upon discovering a small no-smoking café in Bolzano, Italy with 2 computers and an additional line just for laptops.
Generally Speaking….
Counter intuitive as it is, Bill’s axiom for internet connecting is that it is easiest to connect via phone and in internet shops in transitional economies rather than in fully developed economies. For example:
-In
-In
Contact Us
Please let us
know if you or your friends have any sage bits of advice that would help in
making long distance calls or connecting our laptop to the internet. These
continue to be aggravating challenges for us. Just yesterday Bill spent about 2
hours at an internet shop in
Love,
Barb