An estimated 75% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the border to our friends to the south, United States of America. This is why we often travel there for various reasons from business ventures to vacations or shopping and dining. Our Australian and South African clients are also frequent international travellers.

One painful inconvenience of international travel is the high costs of mobile phone operation – both voice and data. Here’s a text message I received as soon as I crossed recently into USA:

Quick math tells me that 100 minutes of talk time will cost me $145 – wow! My main smart phone in Canada is with Rogers, and they do offer Travel Paks (www.rogers.com/roaming/). With one of those purchased in advance, you can get as low as $0.50/minute if purchasing a bundle of 100 minutes. Still very limiting and costly if you plan on staying for several days or weeks.

Value of Unlocked phones

The value of unlocked phones becomes obvious when you realize you can purchase a pre-paid or monthly plan from a number of carriers for about the same price as 100 discounted roaming minutes with Rogers. If you purchased a smartphone at a discount with a contract extension, likely your phone is carrier-locked. It means that using a SIM card from another carrier will not work. In Canada/US, iPhone 4 and 4s models are unlocked only when purchased from Apple directly or authorized retailer (not mobile phone stores). SIM locks vary from country to country, but generally speaking, unlocked phones do not qualify for purchase subsidy, and therefore cost more.

If you are an international traveller and plan on purchasing a new phone, make sure it is not carrier-locked, but rather a complete unlocked phone in which other carrier SIM cards will function.

The next step is to simply purchase a pay-as-you-go SIM or MicroSIM card for your phone when you reach your destination. In my specific example as a Canadian travelling in the USA, the best option was to purchase a $60/mo T-Mobile plan with unlimited talk, text, web up to 2GB of data.

For the frequent international traveller

These guidelines apply if you travel internationally frequently and don’t find it is practical to give a large group of people a temporary foreign contact number at which to reach you while away. You want international travel to be possible without disruption to your important circle of associates and friends and family to be able to reach you.

1. Establish your main contact number to be PBX-driven, not your mobile phone. Having your main number be a virtual number is important for you to establish customized call routing rules. In the US, a popular service is Google Voice, and in Canada a similar set of features (except SMS) is available via RingCentral. If you have an established network of people who only know your mobile number, many countries offer number portability. In Canada, see http://www.wirelessnumberportability.ca/.
2. Use Find-me, Follow-me features on your PBX (or virtual PBX service) to forward your main phone number to the country and mobile number you’re currently at.
3. Avoid SMS messaging from your mobile phone directly as it starts to fragment your phone number identity. Many countries now have services of virtual SMS numbers that integrate with email. It means that SMS messages you receive are translated via email, and you can use email or web interfaces (or apps) to respond. Google Voice does this well (available only in the US).

The difficulty in seamless international travel is that phone systems have their roots in a geographically-zoned world, but the modern virtual and international entrepreneurs don’t know such borders, so it’s a major problem still to be solved.

Have I missed anything valuable in international travel that you want to contribute in the comments?

We are thrilled to be working with the folks over at London LAWN (@londonlawn) to bring free WiFi to downtown London, Ontario. Local businesses are working together to make downtown London a WiFi enabled area, and here is an article from their perspective.

Here is a page showing real-time usage of the London LAWN WiFi network. In the past week along, 544 clients transferred 68.14 GB!

“Launched in September  2011, LAWN (The London Area Wireless Network) currently covers three blocks of Dundas Street, from Talbot to Wellington Streets,” mentions the article. “It is an open and publicly accessible WiFi network that provides free access to the core’s growing population of smartphone, tablet, and laptop users. Whether you work, live, or shop in the city’s core, or just welcome an extra incentive to make the downtown experience better, LAWN is providing a viable and valuable service.”

We helped with a similar project in Lethbridge, Alberta.

If this sounds like something your city or town would be interested in, please let us know!

[this post is from Jonathan Arnoldussen, a Nerd in Lethbridge, Canada, and co-leader of our Online Services Team]

Great News on NerdSpotting! The response to this new app & website has been incredible! Our team has been working extremely hard on this since we launched it, and we have even more updates to report.

First, all posts are now automatically posted to our blog (yep, this one right here!), which then appear on our Facebook fan page and our Twitter account!

Second, you can now visit NerdSpotting, and on the right column you can now filter the images based on geographical location.

Thirdly, our Android app is currently in testing and will probably be submitted to the Android App Store within the next couple of days!

This week, we launched NerdSpotting.com, which is a fun (and free!) iPhone app (direct link to App Store) that lets anyone instantly take a photo of a Nerd from Nerds On Site, of their NerdMobile, or both! It’s a cool way to show that we have Nerds helping business owners with their technology around the world!

Nerds On Site is a GLOBAL team, and now you can see just how global we are! Check out the website to see some of the places our Nerds and NerdMobiles have been spotted!

Apple’s iPhone 4 Alarm Clock did not recognize the time change in Europe, therefore owners were either well rested, or extremely inconvenienced by this big oversight. Europeans turned to social media to voice their displeasure.

Apple acknowledged the bug and is set to release a software update to fix this bug. North American users take note, if this bug is not fixed by the 7th of November when daylight savings is adjusted you might be getting a little extra sleep.

Jail-breaking an iPhone handset invalidates the warranty says Apple.

A second worm to hit the iPhone has been unearthed by security company F-Secure.

It is specifically targeting people in the Netherlands who are using their iPhones for internet banking with Dutch online bank ING.

It redirects the bank’s customers to a lookalike site with a log-in screen.

The worm attacks “jail-broken” phones – a modification which enables the user to run non-Apple approved software on their handset.

The handsets at risk also have SSH (secure shell) installed.

Many people use SSH so other programs can remotely connect to an iPhone and, among other things, transfer files. It comes with a default password, “alpine” which should be changed.

Only users who have installed SSH and not changed the password are at risk.

The new worm is more serious than the first because it can behave like a botnet, warns F-Secure.

This enables the phone to be accessed or controlled remotely without the permission of its owner.

Read more about this

Source: BBC News