My husband and son and I will be visiting Ireland (the Republic and Northern Ireland) in May. I need to stay connected to the Internet for my work a couple of hours a day, and I am also interested in the possibility of using our iPhones for GPS. Another thread in this forum mentioned Mi-Fi, but it was not a recent posting. Does anyone have advice on plans, carriers, devices, options? My mobile carrier (Verizon) offers a plan, but it seems pricey. Thank you for any and all advice you may have.
Posted by
12 posts
We stayed in Dublin & Malahide last year. Stayed in B&Bs with WIFI so that my husband and I could login to work whenever necessary. Worked out perfectly for us. The public buses also had WIFI so we could use that for pulling up info on our phones. Hope this helps.
Posted by
Colorado Springs
2827 posts
We found that all of the pubs had WiFi - demonstrating (once again) that sometimes you have to take the great with the good.
Posted by
Yorkshire
1212 posts
Are you just wanting data for a phone or laptop/netbook or both.
Posted by
Washington DC
27122 posts
You don't need a data plan on your phone (or tablet) or Wi-Fi access to get GPS positioning data. You will, however, need to download the appropriate maps while you have Wi-Fi access.
Posted by
California, USA
69 posts
Autoeurope has MiFi and it's not really that expensive. We looked into it because we wanted to use the gps on our iPhone. With the availability of internet in Ireland these days we decided not to get it. We also found out a lot of the car rental companies offer it also.
We know that in order to just use the data from your iPhone it is quite expensive so we ended up ordering a GPS unit from Autoeurope, which will arrive two days prior to departure and we also are getting an international calling plan from Verizon which will allow our phone calls home to be much cheaper. We are planning on using the free wifi, which appears to be everywhere these days, as much as possible and the calling plan when it is not.
If your planning on doing daily, secure business you would probably be better off with the MiFi.
Hope that helps, Jim
Posted by
1172 posts
There was free wifi everywhere we went last summer so i felt like we were never not connected. We had gotten a plan form our carrier and it was a waste
Posted by
OP
North Carolina
98 posts
Thank you, everyone, for your replies and information. I am glad to learn that Wifi is so readily available. (I didn't realize that I could use Google maps [or similar)] without being connected to wifi or having data "on.") Based on the information here in the forum, I will just be sure to download the maps we need when we are connected--for later use. I'll be using Google Voice for making calls and sending text messages--when I have wifi, so it sounds as if this issue is solved. :-)
Posted by
13 posts
@AVogan - I was curious about Google Voice so I searched it in the App Store and it says it currently only available in the United States. ??