By David F. Gallagher
Special to Interactive Week
November 27, 2000
As I drove 8,000 miles around Europe on a business trip this fall, the navigation system in my car kept track of my location to within a few yards. When I crossed a border, my cell phone took note and seamlessly switched to a new service provider.
My notebook computer, however, was always hopelessly lost.
Like a package tourist seeing Europe's capitals from the safety of a bus, the computer seemed reluctant to deal with the quirks of international travel. Getting it connected to the Internet as I drove through eight countries took a lot of hand-holding, a bit of patience and, of course, the right gear.
Before the trip, I considered purchasing equipment from two companies that claim to have all the phone and power adapters a business traveler could need: Port.com and TeleAdapt. Both offer continent-specific sets of adapters that come in elaborate carrying cases. But I went with TeleAdapt because it offers customized kits. You call and tell them which countries you're going to, and they send you the adapters you need in a little travel bag.
The kit for my trip cost $89, and it reminded me a bit of a tackle box full of exotic fishing lures: I wasn't sure they were all going to be useful, but at least I felt prepared. The sight of all these adapters can either make you marvel at human diversity and ingenuity or make you fall into despair: All this talk of the global village, and we can't even agree on a universal power plug?
As it turns out, most of Europe has agreed that a power plug with two round prongs is the way to go. And surprisingly, about two-thirds of the 18 hotels I stayed in have phone systems that use the standard U.S.-style RJ-11 phone jacks or offer such a jack specifically for modem use. As a result, I never used some of the phone jacks in my kit, including the one for the Netherlands, which looks vaguely like a surgical instrument. I did, however, get to make use of the gracefully curved Swedish power plug.
European hotels that cater to business travelers are quite good about offering convenient modem jacks and power plugs near the desks in their rooms. Older hotels, however, still require you to crawl around on the floor in search of plugs in a way that feels slightly illicit. Only one hotel stumped me completely: the Hotel Atlantis, near Cascais, Portugal, which was full of elderly folks seeking rejuvenating spa treatments.
The Atlantis, including its phone system, has apparently been frozen in time since 1975. A cord came out the back of the mustard-yellow, rotary-dial phone and disappeared into the wall, with no jack on either end. "Our completely automatic telephone system enables you to make calls inside and outside the hotel without the operator's intervention," a card next to the phone announced helpfully.
Rotary phones were a rare sight on the trip, but their underlying pulse-dialing technology is still alive and well across Europe, even in quite modern hotels. At one hotel in Spain, I could hear ghostly clicking noises as my modem's tones were translated into pulses somewhere along the line. In other places I needed to specify pulse dialing in my modem settings before I could connect.
I quickly learned that before messing with plugs in an unfamiliar location, it's best to pick up the phone and listen. Is it a tone- or pulse-dial phone? Does it take a "0" to get an outside line, or something else? Do you need to tell the modem to pause while the outside line kicks in? Listening first saves time later.
My Internet service provider throughout the trip was CompuServe Interactive Services, which is now owned by America Online.
I downloaded a complete list of CompuServe access numbers from the Web before the trip, and these turned out to be quite reliable. If a particular number didn't work, I just tried another one in a nearby city.
All of the hassle of customizing my setup to account for local quirks, plus the hefty phone surcharges on my hotel bills, made me long for the day when dial-up modems become obsolete. Why should I have to haul out a map to see which cities with access numbers are close by? My computer should be able to pull all the information it needs out of the air, like my cell phone does.
The phone's instant messaging capabilities also whetted my appetite for the wireless future. Unlike the U.S., Europe has settled on one standard, the global system for mobile communications, or GSM, for all cell phone networks. This means they all support short messaging services (SMS), allowing subscribers to compose and send text messages, typically for just pennies per message.
My colleagues and I became addicted to the immediacy of SMS, even though tapping out the messages on the phone keypad was a tedious process. I desperately wanted to be able to send an e-mail message flying into the ether from my computer keyboard. Of course, it's already possible to hook up a laptop modem to a cell phone, but the data transmission speeds are so low as to make this impractical for most users. So-called next-generation wireless data services, which are set to launch in Europe sometime in 2001, should change this. How long will it be before wireless modems are standard laptop accessories?
After that, the next thing on my wish list would be a built-in global positioning system receiver. That way, my computer could tell me exactly where I am - not the other way around. And perhaps by the time that Euro-denominated currency arrives in 2002, eliminating pilgrimages to exchange bureaus, my phone adapters will have joined my collection of European coins as souvenirs of a distant age of travel.