OK, I’m old enough to remember when business travel always involved some adept tech juggling as you tried to get an email connection. I mean sufficiently old to remember acoustic couplers stuffed, taped to odd shaped phones and stuffed between a couple of pillows. More recently, getting a connection has involved juggling sim cards and figuring out how to establish wifi connections that didn’t drain the bank account dry.
This time around on my trip to Europe and the CeBIT fair, I opted for a 3G phone and 3G wireless card supplied by AT&T. After a big of debugging mostly involving making sure that wifi nets were disabled while using the wireless card, I can report a lot of success. The connection steps up to 3G when that network is available and steps down to 2G when I hit some more remote areas.
The need as I’ve always seen it, is for a phone and an Internet connection that just works wherever you are without hassle and without excessive charges. The AT&T network, at least in Europe, comes close to that ideal.