ridingtoAix

News

The Bike

startplace

preparations

ontheroad

themountain

Experiences

Toolbox

first law

Feedback

maps

FAQ

The Internet while on the road

I stayed the first night on this trip with a friend and colleague that lives in Vlaardingen. I was of course able to use his phone line, and updated the first posting for the on the road part myself.

Afterwards I expected there would be days when I could use the hotel phone for connection to the net, other days I would have to depend upon the Nokia 6210 (GSM mobile). In the case of Nokia dial ups, I would limit the connection time as much as possible, and only send an edited version to the udena webmaster via email.

Since then I have stayed in two Dutch hotels, one Belgian, and about ten different French 2 -3 star hotels and also farm guesthouses. The guesthouse have no phone installed (which I would expect), however all hotels had phones (in the room) with external dial out capabilities. Except the one in Cambrai, but that was an unusually grotty place.

None of the phones in Holland could be used; they were of the basic French model type (see below). In Belgium (Kortrijk), the phone was probably usable, however since I did not have a subscription with a local Belgian ISP, I avoided the cost of making an international call from the hotel room (to my Dutch ISP), and used the Nokia instead. In Belgium the KPN-Orange network actually supports HSCSD (see Toolbox), and made that an attractive alternative.

In France I have in two hotels (in Reims and in Troyes), stayed in hotels with modern telephone systems installed, so modern (digital switches) that the phones do not work with laptop analogue modems. The alternative (in the other hotels) is what I would call the basic standard French hotel phone, it comes in different colours and with slightly different design, but the basic model looks like this (example is from Grand Hotel in Crest):

This is a phone that has been installed with great care in such a way that it guarantees that a guest will not be able to do anything else than to lift the phone from the hook and make a normal phone call. The line into the physical phone comes out of the wall behind the phone; there are no external wires that may be manipulated, not to mention a standard RJ11 plug. The alternative (as described in the Rough Guide to the Internet), is of course to carry the necessary tools and take the whole thing apart, check signals with the necessary signal tester, and hook up RJ11 contacts via the necessary Chinese back yard connection technology. With a Nokia as alternative it is not worth the bother. It is usually also somewhat embarrassing to have taken the whole system apart, and sit on the floor among line testers and RJ11 connectors and loose bits and pieces of the phone, when the cleaning staff interrupts you while doing all this. But if you are interested in trying that out, read the Rough Guide to the Internet.

The irony of all this is of course that hotel guests hardly ever use the hotels phone any more, at least not for making outside calls. They are too expensive for that, the mobile phone is a much better solution. The result is therefore that hotels put themselves in a situation where either they have upgraded their phone system to a digital standard that is unusable for dial out connections, or have standardised on a technology (the hardwired phone) that makes this impossible in the first place.

Of course the update of the RidingtoAix web-site has been dependent upon being able to make a connection to the Internet one way or another. I have over the last 4 years done that a lot while moving around, with different mobile phones/modems, and from most of the (western) European countries. HSCSD (again see Toolbox) has been a major step forward, since few GSM operators seem to bother implement it, it is less useful than it would have been if more networks had implemented it.

I have sometimes the feeling that all the hype about the mobile Internet, is something dreamt up by the media, by the mobile phone manufacturers, by the GSM operators. My impression is that I am using it, and probably a few thousands more, scattered around at different locations in Europe while on the move. It is not the mass use thing we are told it is or at least will be. If that had been the case, the demand for better services (cheaper and with higher connection speeds), and also demand for better hotel phone systems that could be integrated with laptop modems, would have been heard loud and clear, instead of the deafening silence that is the situation at the moment.

Then there is 3G of course, the new mobile phone system, which all European telcos have invested heavily in, both for licences and eventually in order to build the infrastructure. The idea is that we all will go out and embrace that new technology, because mobile Internet is what the world apparently is waiting for.

I am not so sure. If prices for connection costs do not come down a great deal from todays level, and with a connection infrastructure that allows the non-technical user to connect without bothering about local ISP costs, setting up of POP3 accounts for remote mail access, and all the other trivia that is necessary in order to survive with todays technology, who will be interested?