News

Letter: Ignore "hotspots" - use GPRS!

Reader Steve Patriquen: online at CeBIT, says: "The point about GPRS is that the roaming problem is sorted out pretty well."

Dear Guy,

I was just discussing WiFi vs BT the other day. Now, that shouldn't really be a discussion, because they are two different solutions to supposedly two different problems. BT is short-range and WiFi is longer-range.

I live in London and travel a fair bit. This year I have been in Singapore, South Africa, the US and Canada, Scandinavia, Spain, France, Germany, Hungary and so on. With my Vodafone BT-enabled mobile and GPRS, I have been able (in most places) to connect my PDA or laptop to send and receive e-mail. Which is pretty much all I care about.

It's true that as a web-surfing connection, BT/GPRS is just barely usable. But my philosophy with technology is "if it works at all today, it will be better tomorrow".

One reason this method works - and WiFi doesn't - is that the mobile companies have worked out roaming access pretty well. While WiFI has taken the typical American divide-and-conquer approach. Heck - I still need two phones as a minimum in the US just to make a call, what with all the competing cellular technologies.

Supposedly, I can use WiFi to connect in various places in London. Paddington Station is a hot spot, as are a couple of internet cafes on Queensway, two (yes TWO!) Starbucks in the City, many Costas, and probably Heathrow terminals. BUT - each of these requires a separate subscription, at about £20 a month each (on top of my already-substantial mobile bill), and does me no good anywhere else.

You can also buy a two-hour chunk of access, but it's not two hours you can use incrementally - it's two hours from the time you start using it, even if you only use two minutes.

So let's see, I am working on a major project. I don't need continuous internet access, but I do need to be constantly in the loop. So I'm checking e-mail frequently. I go out for coffee and sign up at Costa for two hours' access (£8, IIRC) and then jump on the Heathrow Express at Paddington, where I pay someone else £8 for two more hours (although I only need ten minutes) and then scoot to Heathrow where I pay another £8 while I wait for my flight. And just how easy is it to pay this charge? Oh, I'm sure a five minute phone call would do it.

What am I missing here? Maybe if my company was stupid, they would pay with no questions. But even then - at free to me - it's not worth the hassle. Maybe in five years this will all shake out, and there will be convergence of ownership and one subscription will work everywhere, just like the mobile phones in the USA. Oh, wait ...

Now, with Bluetooth in my phone and in my PDA and laptop (essentially free) and my GPRS phone (and someday, 3G - at least it will roam). I just sit down, power up and go to work. It even works on the train (sort of). And I only pay for what I use,so if I am connected for ten minutes reading e-mail, I probably only actually move 500k of data, at a cost of less than 10p. Hard to beat that - especially as it works.