GPRS for email on board: the verdict

[chrisrixon]

I have been using Vodafone's GPRS service for emails for about 4 weeks now around Brittany and so far I'm very pleased with it.

It costs about 1p for a KByte which is not cheap but if you only use it for emails and don't have any truck with attachments its very economical. GPRS is always on so you don't have to worry about time on line so you can download emails write your replies and send them in one session without worrying about connect time of fail to connects. In fact I often stay online all day.

Pros:
Cheap to connect (about 2.5p)
Always on
Cheap for emailing several times a day
No need to re-chip phone (works in lots of countries (so they say))

Cons:
Slow (about 2000 bits/sec) ok for email
Only works on SFR network (In France)
Too expensive for web browsing
You need a mail program that will bin attachments
Spam can get expensive

If you have any questions I'd be happy to answer them.

BTW have you seen this 3 day chart for europe from the met?
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/charts/animation.html

I think I'll be able to download it over GPRS for about 50p, could have done with it last month!

Cheers Chris.

 

[ccscott49]

I see you say, it only works in France? not a lot of use for anywhere else? Is that the jist of things?

 

[Gunfleet]

So which is the mail program that bins attachments?

 

[chrisrixon]

It should work in most major european countries. I have so far only tried in UK and France (unless you count channel islands where it doesn't work).

 

[chrisrixon]

Ah well that is a good question. I have written my own system to bin attachments and zip the mail to squeeze the last drop out of VodaFone ...
I think you can get mail clients that only download messages but I don't know which they are, perhaps something like Eudora ....

 

[Guest]

Chris we live in Jersey and at the moment don't have GPRS but we are about to go travelling and what you say sounds good. Do you download your emails to a computer, or just the phone? At the moment we can't even source a cable to connect our Ericsson T39 to our laptop, as we don't have IR or Bluetooth and the local dealers are just useless. Do you know if Vodafone let non UK residents have mobile lines?

 

[chrisrixon]

You'd have to ask Vodafone about Jersey but I don't see why not. GPRS dosn't work in Jersey (but that probably doesn't matter). I download my email to a laptop. My phone is a Motrola T280 (the Nokia I originally bought wouldn't work and had to go back). I use a basic serial cable (not USB). Let me know if that doesn't help.

 

[challenge]

The discussion about GPRS started at a good moment to me. We are preparing ourselves to live aboard but we still have to work as interim managers / consultants and to communicate with our clients. I learned now that GPRS is a good option, instead of expensive Inmarsat systems and I understood it is available in The Netherlands, UK, France.
Does anyone know more about other countries for now and in the future?
Thanks in advance and fair winds.
Best regards,
Dick

 

[Boatman]

It also now works in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and probably the best of all Spain (on Airtel)

 

[challenge]

Thanks for your answer Boatman! It seems that you are an experienced user. Stupid question maybe: Is the type of connection with the foriegn provider based on the roaming method in the way my dutch GSM telephone connect with the foreign provider?
Thanks again.
Best regards,
Dick

 

[Guest]

I built an email system primarily targetted at Iridium Satellite users, but of real benefit to all mobile email users. By default it converts all incoming email to plain text and strips off any attachments, plus trimming email headers down to the bare minimum (the stuff your mail program doesn't show you)

In practice we get about 2:1 speedup for a basic short message that was already in plain text, and between 5:1 and 10:1 speedup for HTML messages. If your attachment was a MS Word, HTML or Acrobat file then we even convert the attachment to text so that you shouldn't be missing out on anything! (I have a program which converts pictures to ASCII drawings if anyone wants to go totally text based!)

Although we target "Mobile" users, I think that we offer a pretty good mail system to rival the big alternatives. You get POP&IMAP access + webmail, free homepage updatable via email (tell everyone where you are) and a massive INBOX (50MB).

Have a peek at http://www.mailasail.com

I am always open to suggestions on how we can improve the system even further - one of the next projects on my list is a clever batching and compressing system for Outlook to really cut-down the download time.

Ed W

http://www.mailasail.com

 

[Gunfleet]

Well Ed it all looks great but $200 on top of the phone bill. We're back in GPRS subscription country. If one were to use your scheme instead one would need to be very confident it would work. I'm self employed and reckon when I'm in France on my boat I spend about £100 per month on email retreival. But I'm only doing that for say 3 months a year. For your scheme to work for email boaters like me - instead of year long blue water or live-aboard types - I'd have to amortize the $200 over 3 months, say £50 per month. I think it might be worth your while considering offering a short term package to people like me. There's a lot of us!
John

 

[Guest]

The amounts are in Dollars for two reasons,

a) because many customers are international and hence find it easier to think in USD (I don't, and I guess you don't either, sorry)

b) It is easier to accept internet payments in USD.

However, we can accept sterling cheques or money orders. Price is £140/year, or £14/month. Which for a three month period is £42.

The service is designed to be an all round good email service, and we would really like to try and keep your custom both on and off boat (by being better than Hotmail, Yahoo, etc).

As far as cost is concerned I think we are in the same price bracket as an AOL or Demon account, or whatever? It's a different service of course, but many of our customers will be using Iridium, or (hopefully) GPRS for internet access and are frequently paying for their old internet service as well, so cancelling that leaves them about even.

I would rather that we took on fewer customers and actively understood their needs and tuned the service appropriately than simply stuffing in customers a Yahoo, etc do... This way we can keep the service fast and targeted at a niche market.

If you or anyone else are interested, then we offer a propective customer a no obligation trial period. Basically we expect you to either like it and sign up, or ditch it because it doesn't save you money... Can't say fairer than that!

(Email is: Ed@mailasail.com if you would like to mail me offlist)

Ed W

http://www.mailasail.com

 

[chrisrixon]

An update. I can confirm GPRS works in Spain ....