our australian Adventure - Part 3 - redundant systems

100822 Brisbane Australia

In our house swap the nice owners have an internet connection that is freely available to us.  Having ready access to the internet is absolutely essential if you are going to pull off the 'extended absence' life.  

I am traveling with a MacBook notebook, an iPad and an iPhone.  But that stuff isn't really important.  

What is important is that I have three separate ways to get connected to the internet.

The internet access here in the house isn't used to people that watch movies sourced on the spot from iTunes. We blew thru the bandwidth cap in the first 36 hours of our arrival.  Once we used up the data plan the internet service was essentially shut off.  64K down - oh yeah! (Mom, that's like drinking a container of Vicks Vapo-rub thru a straw)

It turns out that our normal usage is about 100 times the normal usage of our home owner.  Whoops.

We organized to get the service upgraded for our stay but that took a day and half.  So no internet from the home setup during that time.  

Fortunately we were not 'stuck' because on arrival in Sydney we got data plans for our iPads from one provided called Telstra and from another provider called Yes Optus for our iPhones.  

Why two different providers?  Again redundancy, in some places Optus works best while in others Telstra is best.

So the household internet problem was inconvenient (the family had a 'conversation' two nights ago over dinner instead of watching a movie) but I could still communicate with the team back home as required.

I did find that the slower 3G cell phone system based internet service lead me to put off getting 'real work' done.  It was just an excuse.  I'll be able to do it faster tomorrow so I'll wait until then...'bollock' as they say down here, it was just an excuse.

Even though it ain't free having multiple redundant methods to access the internet means that you can do what you need to do when you need to do it back home.    

The 200gb per month internet package upgrade will cost is $90, the three iPhone pay as you go cards cost about $50 each for the month, and the two iPads data plans cost about $30 each.  6 nice bottles of Australian wine.

We purchased our new iPhone4's in Canada directly from Apple because they could be purchased as 'unlocked' devices.  That means that we can use our Roger's cell phone plan when in Toronto but on arrival in Sydney we purchased the Yes Optus (funny name for a cell phone service I grant you) and we were able to plunk the new cards into the devices and they worked without hassle.

A 'locked' phone means that your cell provider sold you the phone likely at a discount but only because they have set it up to only work with their network.  They have you as a hostage if you are going to use that phone.  Use it and they get paid.

An unlocked phone is not stuck on a single network.  You can travel with it and it will work with any compatible service provider (two kinds - CDMA (like Bell) and GSM - like almost everywhere else)  The GSM phones use little SIM cards and these are the ones that can, if unlocked, be used any place.

The iPhones cost more buying them unlocked from Apple, perhaps $300 more each.  But if you have ever enjoyed a bill from your cell phone company that includes 'roaming charges' you will see this $300 is nothing over the life of the phone.

The added bonus if this cell phone machination is that Lynn, William and I each have Australian cell phone numbers and we can call each other anytime cell phone to cell phone for free as a local call.

The alternative to this unlocked iPhone approach would have been to purchase a throw away cell phone and a one month prepaid package but that would only give us cell local in Australia and no data for internet. And the cost would start to get near the extra we paid for the iPhones.

Finally we could use the skills of my 16 year old and 'force' unlock locked phones.  But that's not 'allowed' - is it still illegal?  I don't know.  And it might not be reliable and it might take a lot of time, and it might waste time - so we didn't bother.

Fortunately Apple has made every iPad unlocked so we had no issue purchasing our data plans from Telstra.  Except the activation process which here requires a call into Telstra but that was a small hassle.

Well, it looks like there is no excuse to turn from writing pithy posts to actually working on client proposals. Hi Ho, Hi Ho, it's off to work I go...