Innovation definitely helped: phones got smaller and notebooks, lighter. But the real change was in the way I planned the trip. What’s smart technology behind a desk may be no good at all on the road. There are trade-offs, to be sure. But lightness and convenience in return for accepting something less than full functionality? That’s a deal I’ll take any time.
A mobile telephone will be at the top of your travel technology plan. But which one? My Singapore communications fiasco was due to my failure to research network technology there. Cell phones are really radios. They connect via a network using a designated slice of the electromagnetic spectrum. The trouble is, different governments assign different frequencies to cellular carriers. And different carriers use different radio technologies. The result is confusion. Europe has the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM). So do China, Japan, the Middle East and Latin America. The United States, though, has four different and mutually incompatible systems, including a variant of GSM. But it’s on a different frequency from the European version, so a phone good for Prague won’t work in Poughkeepsie unless it’s a “world phone” from, say, Ericsson.
Why not build a phone that can switch among the different technologies? There isn’t room enough in the handsets to fit in all the circuitry. World phones aren’t a solution: they only support variations on the GSM standard, making them useless for most American networks. Embedding every individual standard into a cell phone would yield a device that gobbled up battery life and redefined bulk. It would, in effect, be four different devices in one box. “You’d need a Radio Flyer wagon to carry that around,” says David Chamberlain, research director for wireless Internet services and networks at Probe Research of Cedar Knolls, N.J. For travel within the United States, “tri-mode” phones will work almost anyplace with a wireless network. Just don’t expect yours to connect beyond the border.
The European standard prevails in enough countries–about 120–to justify investment in a world phone. The Motorola i2000, for example, available through Nextel, combines international roaming with a walkie-talkie function, allowing you to communicate outside the network with other Nextel customers–a good feature for negotiations when you and your colleagues are on-site together. The Sony Ericsson T68i, offered by AT&T, has a color screen and support for multimedia messaging. Very cool.
And yet my GSM-capable phone didn’t work in Asia. I was missing a removable chip called a SIM card. A little bigger than a fingernail, a SIM card identifies you to the local wireless network, telling it you’re an authorized user. Don’t make my mistake. You can buy worldwide SIM cards. Or you can buy country-specific ones. Either way, you need them. Enter “SIM card” in an Internet search engine to find a provider you might like.
If you don’t do much intercontinental travel, you can always rent a cell phone. A Web-based service called WorldCell (worldcell.com), will provide the right local device for $75 a week. For local calls, you’ll pay about $1 a minute. For calls back to the United States: $2 to $5 a minute, depending on where you are. Many regions, such as South Korea, Japan and most of South America, use non-GSM technologies that need location-specific handsets, and rental may be the only practical choice. A trip through multiple countries could well demand multiple handsets. (To learn about carriers and technologies in any given country, go to cellular news.com/coverage.)
But if you go to any one country at least four times a year, you might as well purchase one, says John Rakolta Jr., chairman and CEO of Walbridge Aldinger Co., a builder of automotive facilities, who has projects in places ranging from the United States to Romania and India. Rakolta used to be a WorldCell customer, but found it too expensive in the long run. “You have to amortize the cost of the phone over the number of minutes you have,” he explains. “Companies like ours can’t afford to pay $120 for a phone call.” Instead, he has a T-Mobile account and GSM phone with “better coverage in Europe than in the United States,” although reception is fine at his headquarters in Detroit. He carries a second cell from Verizon in the United States to ensure a signal everywhere, because vendors differ in coverage. Rakolta spent about $20 for SIM cards for each country he frequents; phone cards then give him 20 or 30 cents per minute of air time.
Beyond convenience, cell phones can be a literal lifesaver. “We had one guy [in Cambodia] call my service line and say, ‘Help, there are mortars landing around me and machine-gun fire all over the place’,” says Blake Swensrud, founder of the WorldCell service. An employee connected the customer to the State Department, where someone walked him by phone to the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh. (You want to prepare yourself in advance for that nasty little local war? For $25 per query a Web-based company called iJet Travel Intelligence, at iJet.com, can provide real-time notes of all problems, whether earthquakes or revolutions, in your travel destinations.)
After voice, access to e-mail and other Internet services might be the biggest concern of the business traveler. Special connectors can turn cell phones into modems for laptops, but current wireless networks are infuriatingly slow. With data-transmission rates in the 9.6 to 14.4 kilobytes-per-second range, they are at best one fourth the speed of standard dial-up modems. Several U.S. carriers, notably Verizon and Sprint, have started faster “third-generation” (3G) wireless networks, in which speeds are closer to a 56K dial-up connection, but coverage is still spotty. “You’re still taking your chances outside of [major] cities with these,” says Probe Research’s Chamberlain.
With 3G networks, you may be able to plug a wireless-modem card directly into your notebook’s PC Card slot, bypassing the cable-to-handset connection completely. But these services can be expensive: more than $100 a month for unlimited use from Verizon, for example. Quick calculations show, though, that a willingness to stay in less than four-star hotels for only five days a month could pay Verizon’s bill. Your choice.
Or you could forget cellular altogether. Another choice is to rely on local area networks operated by hotels, airports and convention centers. Hotels that court business travelers are making high-speed Internet access available to their guests (ask in advance anyway, to make sure that you can plug your laptop into a local network from your room). Many establishments also now support the new wireless standard known as 802.11, or more popularly “Wi-Fi,” which allows you to connect to their networks without cables, as long as you’re within 30 feet of an access point.
In theory. The reality may be different. “Hooking up with a wireless network in an airport or hotel, I’ve personally found limited,” says Brian Mennecke, an associate professor of management information systems at Iowa State University. “I was traveling to Japan, and I couldn’t find a wireless connection I could connect to.” Laptops can be hard to configure. The answer: maintain a dial-up account, perhaps with CompuServe, which has an extensive worldwide network. (Most American providers of Internet service are useless outside the country.) Or you could rely on Internet cafes and copy shops in big cities. They’ve kept me in the loop through Hong Kong, Helsinki and London. Rates are usually cheap, and you can retrieve messages from your usual e-mail box through a free Web-based e-mail account like those from Yahoo. You might also be able to automatically forward messages to a Web account. (Whatever you do, though, be careful with “out of the office” automatic replies. Newsgroup subscriptions can cause a message ping-pong chain reaction that bring down a mail server.)
How about that laptop you love for the many things it can do, from spreadsheets to PowerPoint? Are you sure you need it on the road? If you can do without the DVD drive (how important is that movie on the airplane?), you should switch to a PDA with an accessory keyboard. (Targus makes one I’ve abused with no harm done.) It will let you write reports, do expenses and track your appointments. Then when you get back home you can sync up with your desktop for other tasks such as logging in new contacts. My own preference is for a Pocket PC over a PDA using the Palm system, particularly models that support useful accessories like an Ethernet card, allowing you to plug into office networks.
One of the things that always concerned me about traveling with a Pocket PC as my mainstay in the past has been storage. If the power ever did completely go, so would every file I had created. But IBM and Toshiba now offer PC Cards that are actually 5- or 10-gigabyte hard drives. Put your critical documents on these and relax. And if you are still toting the laptop, consider buying a key-chain drive, a tiny storage device that literally hangs from a key chain. It will hold several hundred megabytes of data, and all you do is plug it into your laptop. Then, if your computer is lost, stolen or drop-kicked by an aggressive baggage handler, your important files are safe in your pocket. And you will have slimmed your technology profile. If only I could change my waistline so easily.
