How
Do We Connect to the Internet?
Internet connections for our laptop while living on
a bicycle in foreign countries is always an interesting story.
Basically we slink around town looking for any opportunity to update our
web site or at least send and receive email. |
Our connection to the Internet is shaky at best. We try
to frequent Internet Cafe's as often as we can but we are not always in the city.
We use internet cafe's mainly to research places or different cultures that are in the
near future for us. We also use Internet Cafes to research and buy Airline
Tickets. We simply are not around them enough to be our only connection.
For
regular email and posting to our web site we use an Acoustic Coupler. I believe that
the Acoustic Coupler was one of the first kind of modem. It is a devise where you
place the handset of a phone into the coupler and it literally transfer the digital data
by sound to and from the internet (see photos on this page). The advantage is that
we can use any hotel or pay phone in the world. The Acoustic Coupler eliminates the
problem of weird phone jacks and multi-line phone. We simply roll up to any old pay
phone and get our email and update our site.
It is very slow. The fasted connection speed I have ever seen was from a
pay phone in Arizona making a local call. That was 24.00 Kbs. We often connect
as low as 2.40 Kbs. Your typical dial up connection is at least 52.00 - 58.80
Kbs. Because this is the main way that we send/receive email we ask people to just
send text emails when they email us. Click here (email
us) to send your message.
Fortunately my brother owns a dial up (and more) server in Indianapolis, Indiana called
surf-ici.com This is nice because we do not have
to pay a monthly fee to a dial up provider but the cost of calling Indiana with a calling
card can be as much as $1 US/minute depending on the cost from the country we are
currently in.
Connecting to the Internet while
world traveling, backpacking, bicycle touring in foreign countries
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