GPRS Internet is go for europe?

[chrisrixon]

Vodafone have just announced that they have launched GPRS roaming in Europe. Worth looking at for emailng ...

"The service works in 12 countries. Here's the list: Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. At present, GPRS roaming in Germany is limited to a few cities, with full nationwide coverage coming on stream at the end of April. As for the rest of Europe, Vodafone is rolling out the service to affiliates with aim for complete coverage by the end of the year. "

from:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/59/24564.html

 

[Guest]

just had a look at the prices

I don't really think they expect anything other than business customers, it seems very expensive. Even my sat phone is cheaper, although I can't connect to the web from it. Until prices come down, internet cafes will have to be the way for me.

 

[chrisrixon]

Re: just had a look at the prices

How much does your sat phone cost? Do you pay per MByte? The point about GPRS is that you only pay for data, not connect time so if you are mainly doing emails you can keep the data down and not have to worry about connect time.

 

[HaraldS]

Re: just had a look at the prices

I'm using GPRS in business and while prices have come down, roaming is still very expensive.

It does become cheaper if you use it for surfing the internet, because you are not paying while looking at a page. E-mail is a differnt story as you usually pull all new mail you want and also send all new mail that you prepared offline more or less in one go.

If you are using the bandwidth on a dial up line, especially when roamed, you are usually better off. From what I have seen, a minute of local call in the country you roamed to, costs about the same as 10KB on roamed GPRS. In a minute I can do around 50KB on a local data call.

Roamed loacal calls seem to go from €0.3 to €1.2 around Europe and depend a lot on which carrier you pick. Roamed calls to home country seem between €0.5 to €3.0 so can be more than Iridium at $1.5 no matter where.

When you sail, roaming has the advantage that you can pick any carrier, so the coverage is better than if you subscribe to one local provider or buy a pre-paid. Price wise however, the later is always cheaper.

You could argue that you don't need an ISP with GPRS, since it just puts you on the Internet. But I still think that if you travel a lot, having global ISP with local dial in points everywhere is a necessity.

Haven't seen cheap pre-paid GPRS yet, maybe it'll come. So far the only reasonbly low GPRS at around 3 cents Euro for 10KB, seem to go only with expensive contracts. The other GPRS rates are often 10 times higher.

Iridium is said to do air-time management if you use their Internet gateway, which means they disconnect and reconnet you transparently if you pause transmitting or receiving data. Timing for that seems selectable.

Another interesting thing with Iridium is that you can send 'free' SMS from the Internet to any Iridium phone.

As expensive GPRS is, I don't think that data via satellite is cheaper than even the most expensive roamed GPRS.

On Iridium, fully utilizing the airtime and assuming no compression 10KB would translate into about one dollar, which is definitely more than even roamed GPRS.

Inmarsat Mini-M is same speed but higher airtime cost than Iridium, so would be even more expensive.

The 'cheapest' data on satellite would probably be Inmarsat B at $10 a minute for 64kbit (ISDN) connection speed. It would be $0.26 for 10KB and still more expensive than roamed GPRS.

 

[jonic]

Re: just had a look at the prices

haralds

Which is the best global isp with local connection points? are ther any free ones?

http://web.ukonline.co.uk/yacht/serafina/

 

[Boatman]

They might be offering it, but it doesn't work. I have GPRS in Switzerland where it works perfectly, I have tried roming and no go in any of the countries mentioned apart from the UK which I haven't tried yet. If you get a connection it is wonderous.

 

[HaraldS]

Re: just had a look at the prices

Right now I'm using ATT business service. They have dial-in points about anywhere. That's a business package for the company with many subs, so I''m not sure how much it is. I'm sure it's aimed at high usage. Has worked for me about anywhere, but not in the Caribean Islands. From Antugua I had to dial Florida at a huge expense.
Not sure anybody covers those exotic places well.
I'll be retirering to mostly sailing in the near future, so I'll too have to look for alternatives.
Haven't seen anything free, except that you may find these on an individual country basis.
Will check with a friend in Switzerland who told me that he had this great and very cheap worldwide service.
On the cheaper side of the ones I know is Maglobe with a prepaid charge of $50 and up, valid for one year, you get access points in lots of countries for $4 an hour, and online rechargeable.
I'll probably get something like this when I have no busniess account any more.

This year I plan to try out a few other things in addition, one is Iridium, the other is an SSB mail service. The later should be ok for modest size e-mail and loading weather routing data. That will also give me an e-mail account that's tuned for keeping things short and I can use that account also from Iridium or whenever I have high airtime cost.

The SSB access has no connect time fees, but an annual fee of €300. There is a new provider for that service on 8 frequencies, you find it at www.kielradio.com . They use the new pactor III mode which should give also 2400bd on a decent connection.