Wireless travels in Europe: has Europe achieved wireless ubiquity?

DRIVING 1-15 FROM SAN DIEGO to Las Vegas I needed to deal with some Lotus Notes e-mail and Lotus Domino work on our Web network. So I pulled off at the Barstow Starbucks and grabbed a very fast T-Mobile HotSpot Wi-Fi connection. However, back on the road, I needed to connect again. I fired up my Sierra Wireless AirCard 750, which quickly found a T-Mobile GPRS Internet connection, and I finished up my work. Big deal? Well, consider: I was in the absolute middle of nowhere; and I was in a car moving 70mph (no, I wasn't driving it). Given the situation, T-Mobile wireless Internet was wonderful to have.

But I have to add, "when it works," which depends on T-Mobile network coverage. In the U.S., no mobile phone network has the coverage it should--or could--have, and the situation is even bleaker for wireless data networks.

The spotty, inconsistent American network is due to the government allowing, in fact encouraging, several wireless companies to build separate, incompatible radio networks. U.S. wireless carriers use different radio frequencies, different technology to transmit voice and data, different antenna sites, and different mobile phones. It's all incompatible. Because it's so inefficient, it's inherently expensive, yet unreliable.

Does Europe have it figured out?

I'd been hearing from European colleagues that I needed to see how they do it. Europe uses one standard, GSM, now enhanced with GPRS, on two frequency bands, 900MHz and 1800MHz. There are several mobile service companies, but they cooperate (or so I was told) with service and billing.

Of course, it's easy to say "mine is better than yours," so I decided to check European wireless data service first-hand. Using my U.S.-based T-Mobile Wireless Internet service, a T-Mobile-branded Sierra Wireless AirCard 750, and an IBM ThinkPad X31, I tried several mobile carriers, in Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. My plan wasn't to explicitly test T-Mobile, but since that's the Europe-capable service I have, my journey also shines some light on T-Mobile's service and software.

I expected to have service in major cities, so I also sought out small villages, country roads, and formidable mountains, I'd pull out my Michelin map, look for the yellow+green squiggle that signifies a minor but scenic country or mountain road, and drive it, stopping to test whenever I was so far into the sticks I was sure no mobile company would bother to provide coverage. At every stop, I was wrong!

The executive summary of my experiment is easy to state: Wireless Internet works, at least in central Europe! If you want to be footloose but connected, do it in Europe. Here's some of what I experienced.

In the extended version of this column at http://Advisor.com/doc/14662 you'll get more details, plus photographs from my trip. They may seem dramatized, but they are all legit demonstrations of the ubiquity of GPRS in Europe. In every photo, I'm wirelessly connected to the Internet and hitting an ADVISOR or other Web site, connecting to our internal network, checking my e-mail, etc.

My test started in The Netherlands, site of the ADVISOR SUMMIT conference on Novell GroupWise, held in the Scheveningen beach resort area of The Hague. The day before I hooked up to the historic Kurhaus Hotel's Wi-Fi network, my T-Mobile Internet card quickly found Dutch carrier KPN and gave me a good Internet connection.

My first discovery was about Wi-Fi. At this ADVISOR SUMMIT, D-Link set up two wireless networks, one for delegates ("attendees" as we call them in America), and one for our conference team. Oddly, I was sitting 5 feet from an access point but could only connect to one on the other side of the hotel. The D-Link engineer was stumped, but just for a moment. Then he smiled and said, "You have an American Wi-Fi system, yes?" In Europe, Wi-Fi systems can use channels 1 to 14, but in the U.S. only channels 1 to 11 are allowed. He switched the access point from channel 14 to 11 and 1 connected. Just in case I'd encounter this again during my trip, I switched my ThinkPad's internal Intel Wi-Fi card to use all the European channels. Dig around and you'll find this option for most Wi-Fi cards, but remember to switch back before returning to the U.S.

After the conference, my wife (and ADVISOR president) Jeanne and I headed for the hills, literally, in search of test sites. We ended up in a hilltop suburb of Liege, Belgium. I walked into my hotel room, popped open my ThinkPad, and while I was doing my usual check of the room's phone for a wired dial-up jack, my laptop suddenly beeped: It connected to the Internet via the T-Mobile card, still enabled from my Netherlands use. Hey, this is easy!

This particular connection, on a Saturday, was also quite fast. How fast, the AirCard doesn't say. Oddly, it always claims to be connected at "40kbps," no matter how fast or slow the throughput really is.

Next, we ended up in La Bresse, France, a mountain village in a skiing region. Though "downtown" La Bresse is just two blocks long, I got an excellent France Orange signal, an average-speed Internet connection, and fresh-baked baguettes that no other country seems capable of making.

In Mulhouse, France, the default connection to Orange was very slow in the evening. Using the Watcher software included with the Sierra Wireless AirCard, I discovered another carrier, Bouyges Telecom, but it wouldn't provide a GPRS connection. Then I tried SFR Cegetel, which connected quickly and provided a responsive Internet connection. However, the next morning SFR was sluggish, so I switched back to Orange and got a decent connection. The only Web site that wouldn't come up--get this--was the U.S. T-Mobile site that listed its international Wi-Fi hotspots.

After many attempts to access the U.S. T-Mobile HotSpot listing, I e-mailed a friend in Germany, technology journalist Volker Weber, who sent me a link to the German-language T-Mobile HotSpot site. While some of its pages were too massive to load via a slow connection, the lengthy list gave me confidence rd find a HotSpot just about anywhere in Germany (and in an expanding number of cities in the U.K.) However, T-Mobile Wi-Fi HotSpots in other places are sparse, and non-existent in several countries, including France and Switzerland.

Driving into the Rhone River valley, I connected just fine in Sion, with a strong Orange signal and a noticeably fast Internet connection. But what about a town so far into rugged Swiss Alps that you can't drive there? At the end of a mountain railway, Zermatt is base camp for the Matterhorn. My first test suggested trouble, a good Orange signal but a slow connection. Using the Watcher software I discovered another carrier, Sunrise, which provided an Internet connection of above average throughput.

One morning I was high in the mountains of the French province of Alsace, deep in a forest, parked along a narrow road, sitting on a rough-hewn wooden bench in front of a monument to German soldiers in the battle of Moscow in December 1941. And I was on the Web, reviewing some Advisor Alerts (e-mail sent to magazine subscribers telling them of newly-posted articles). I sent some e-mail, toured the monument, and continued through the French mountains toward the Saarland state of Germany.

Finally, we could turn the car toward T-Mobile's homeland, Germany. In Volklingen, we found a McDonalds promising Wi-Fi. Sure enough, a table in the corner had an illuminated T-Mobile HotSpot sign. My U.S. login worked, and I was online--FAST--in just a minute. But although the connection was fine, this McDonalds was not an optimal temporary office. Try concentrating on work while sitting two feet from a large birthday party. The HotSpot corner and the group party corner are one and the same! There were other open areas in the restaurant, so I assume McDonald's store planners have no clue what a Wi-Fi wants--a place to do work, which implies at least a small separation from screaming kids!

What price roaming?

Of course, there's a downside to wandering Europe wirelessly. When used stateside, my T-Mobile Wireless Internet account provides unlimited usage. It's not truly unlimited; T-Mobile has rules that shut down excessive abuse. But it's been unlimited (but not especially fast) for my purposes, so I don't have to count minutes or bytes when using it around the U.S.

Europe is different. I knew from checking T-Mobile.com that roaming in most European countries costs 1.5 cents per kilobyte. Sure enough, T-Mobile sent me a long statement listing all my connections to various European carriers in various cities, with a rather large "Total Due" at the bottom. Not a surprise, but "ouch!"

I probably could have saved quite a bit by using Web-based e-mail, scanning the subject lines and opening only those I cared to, rather than downloading all of them. And if l avoided visiting Web sites and doing online development, I would have saved even more. It's hard to say how conservative wireless use would compare with using dial-up from hotel rooms, because of the outrageous phone fees European hotels charge.

Or, I could have wandered around until I found a pay-as-you-go Internet cafe or Wi-Fi system. But neither were available in the remote areas I visited, and going to a specific address in a city has its own set of costs, including transportation, parking, time, and hassles.

The best deal was using T-Mobile HotSpot Wi-Fi service; if only it was more widespread. While Starbucks are scarce in Europe outside of Britain, there are enough hotels (and a few McDonalds) to make T-Mobile HotSpot practical in a few countries. I don't mean to downgrade other Wi-Fi networks that might have been helpful, but I'm not aware of any as large or economical as T-Mobile's.

In the U.S., the wireless data performance of the reasonably widespread GPRS system used by T-Mobile is dramatically exceeded by new technology used by Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and others. But their promises of super-fast connections are coupled with "where available" which is in darn few places. But that's the topic of another article; stay tuned.

What's your wireless Internet roaming experience? I'd love to hear from you at http://Contact.Advisor.com.

The extended version of this column contains more details, plus photos, at http://Advisor.com/doc/14662.