July 2, 2003
Roaming Access
Matthew talks about a fictional WLAN global passport granting him wireless access throughout Europe and the US. A nice idea, and it would certainly have come in handy when David and I were over in the States earlier this year. We managed to get by, however. Here's some tips for those travelling to America.
Look for Beaner's. The Beaner's coffee shop chain appear to be pretty well wired. We spent many hours working late into the night in the Lansing branch, with good, free, fast connections.
Ask the proprietor. A number of places we went in to looked like they didn't have wireless, but after some friendly questioning of the (usually) bar staff, we found a few places where we could get paid-for connections. It became a routine to sign up for wireless with companies in each location.
Prepare services beforehand. One of the most common problems we had was that no local SMTP service was provided. If you can, configure your company mail server to support authenticated SMTP, so you can send mail via it regardless of where you are. You may need to set up a VPN in order to do this, since occassionally traffic on several useful ports was blocked.
Posted by savs at July 2, 2003 12:45 PM