I tried to see if something like this had already been covered in the archives, but couldn’t find anything…
One of my friends is looking for a new ISP. He’s been using Compuserve, but wants to make a switch because he’s expecting to travel more abroad in the next couple of years, and Compuserve doesn’t have extensive global access (just a handful of countries).
We surfed around to check out some possibilities like att.net and uunet, but they don’t give all the details of their service plans (cost? unlimited access?). Deja.com revealed a whole lot of malcontents, but not much else; CNET doesn’t let you filter the ISP listing for those that have global access numbers.
Any and all suggestions (for good or bad) are welcome.
I have some experience in this field and I am afraid there is no simple answer because it depends where you will travel, how often, for how long and what your needs are.
Ironically Compuserve used to be the answer as they had the most extensive network but they have been shrinking and screwing up more and more so I cancelled. Their customer service was always awful and it got even worse. I get the impression AOL is just trying to close it down and get the users onto AOL.
So, IBM I believe has service in many countries but it don’t come cheap.
You can also check http://www.ipass.com/ but I have not found them to be worthwhile.
In many countries, just like in the US, you can get free access (you just pay for the local call) so that is what I mostly do.
In other countries (like China) the whole state of things is so deplorable I just use a cybercafe when i absolutely need to connect, but mostly I try to do without.
If you give more concise information about his needs I could be more specific about solutions.
Most of the time when he travels he’s in the US, generally somewhere in the Northeast (NY, NJ, PA, VT, DE, VA, MD). With conferences and consulting work he will be spending some time in France, Germany and Israel for sure. Other possible destinations include Canada, India, Poland, Jordan, England, Australia, and Micronesia. Travel at home is usually for a week or less; abroad, it may be anywhere between 1-8 weeks.
He has a local web host for his web site, and an email address through his own domain that is currently forwarded to his Compuserve account. The dial-up access he needs would be mostly for email & web access, possibly some ftp.
Because of time differences & whatnot, he expects to rely heavily on email for communicating with the office. I think he’d be willing to pay a bit more for access when he’s overseas as long as he was able to make connections reliably, but rates here in the US shouldn’t be outrageous.
I was trying to find one yesterday too. I know Compuserve has numbers in England so I might go with that. I have a friend who travels the world for years using Compuserve & I always read back from her.
MSN ? Surely they must have some international numbers. What do you think? I don’t think there are free ISP’s in England.