We travel with a little Macbook Air laptop for blogging, email, Skype, etc and our habit in the past has been to rely on whatever free wifi signals we can get, either provided by our lodgings or at places like McDonalds (yuk) or pay hourly fees when we have to. But this has often led to wasted time looking for a place with a decent signal, and lots of pesky little fees here and there to get internet time - it adds up. I've never used a USB dongle from a 3G provider before, but I'm considering it now as a measure to save on hassle and potentially save on costs, too. If I can get a moderate speed reliable signal for about an hour a day for a month for something like 30-50 euro, it would be worth it. If you have experience with this - particularly in Italy - I would appreciate being walked through the process. Thank you...
Posted by
Birmingham, Alabama, USA
290 posts
With Tim or Vodafone you will get pretty good coverage in many parts of Italy. I think the cost is very high for what you get, but if this is worth it to you then by all means, go for it. Unless you speak Italian, make sure you go to one of the bigger/centrally located stores for either company, where there are more likely to be some employees who speak decent English.
Posted by
Vernon, Canada
32392 posts
Randy, Some of the "travel phone" firms also offer USB MoDems, so that might be another option. The prices are a bit "steep" though. One that I checked offered the MoDem for $129 plus the cost of the data plan which was $99 for 50 MB. Happy travels!
Posted by
OP
Minneapolis, MN, USA
1525 posts
Yea, the cost has been hard to pin down. I've been trying to navigate their web sites in translated Italian and the prices seemed reasonable (sub 50-euro range for month) but it's not clear what is or isn't included. As a natural cheapskate, I prefer finding free wifi. But I've read that that is harder in Italy than elsewhere. Last summer Down Under we paid $3-5 every night for mediocre internet access and that gets old fast.
Posted by
Tuscaloosa, AL
1152 posts
Randy, there have been some posts here in the recent past where travelers have successfully gotten European data plans for their iPads or phones at reasonable cost. I would imagine the rates would be similar for a USB device (or you could get a portable wifi device - essentially a phone that just makes a data connection and then sets up a wifi connection). Here is a post from Mathew in San Francisco from last September: "We were there a few months ago and took an iPad2 with us. We went to a TIM store and bought a Micro-SIM with 1Gigabyte data plan. Ask for the tablet plan and make sure they give you the 1G of data (there's also a 10Gig plan too). They even installed the TIM micro-SIM card for us in the store they're very familiar with the iPad2." "It cost us about 30 euros (don't remember the exact amount). We were there for 2 weeks and didn't come close to using 1 Gig of data." IPAD 2 with wireless and 3G for Italy