After driving more than 1000 miles around the UK (supposed to be an EU country but they still use miles there, they pay with Pounds instead of Euros, they drive on the left, etc.), I figured out how to get Internet connectivity. My 802.11 card never found any wireless networks. Brand-new $300/night Hilton and Sheraton hotels did not have connections in their rooms. Most Brits that I spoke with had never used the Internet and of those who had, most had done so only from work. There are Internet cafes in the big cities but you can’t connect your own laptop.
How to connect then when in the UK? It is as simple as getting on a plane at Heathrow Airport… I’m in Tel Aviv now. Expect some leftover postings about life in England, Wales, and Scotland to appear in the next few days…
I agree that hotels in the UK are a disgrace – but don’t forget Europe-wide GPRS connectivity will give you reasonable browsing speed indoors or out with a simple connection through your phone.
We used internet cafes in Scotland, Ireland, & London and connected our laptop without a hassle. On the contrary, the places in Dublin and Edinburgh had spots set aside to do just that. In smaller cities we just dialed up. No problem. (We stayed in hostels, B&Bs, and budget hotels though.)
“Most Brits that I spoke with had never used the Internet and of those who had, most had done so only from work.”
Did you spent all of your time in a small village in North Wales per chance?
“Most Brits that I spoke with had never used the Internet and of those who had, most had done so only from work.”
Did you spent all of your time in a small village in North Wales per chance?
Are you krazy! The UK has more netivity than Bush has cliches 😉
The only wireless thing in the UK is Tony Blair. He’s remote controlled by Bush.
This is not the type of ignorance I’d expect from someone with such an excellent surname.
There are about 1000 hotspots across the UK and the number is growing by at least 20% a month Next time you are in the UK check into a Hilton, or pull off the freeway into a Road Chef Service station, have a munch at Bagel Mania or get a nice frothy caramel machiatto around those lips of yours and GET SOME WI-FI ACTION DUDE!
here’s 20p, buy a clue.
Someone can’t have looked very hard.
Aside from the commericial hotspots (there’s a list at http://www.hotspothotel.com/) on the 1 hour train journey to work I pass 8 open WLANs. This, of course, may be due to user stupidity rather than generousity.
EasyInternet cafes also allow you to plug in your laptop. Considering this is the biggest chain, either Philip staying in a 4 square mile radius in Cornwell, Lancashire or Oban (this could be the case, witness the idiotic statement about most brits not having heard of the internet – I guess that gorwing number of broadband connections is all 1 person), or he didn’t try very hard at all.
(As an aside, I didn’t find any public Wifi points in the centre of NYC in January, the pay per use StarBucks points may have driven them all out)
It is true that I didn’t spend all of my vacation looking for IP connectivity. And I didn’t go to any big cities except for Edinburgh (where I stayed in a very expensive downtown Hilton that had been renovated in the previous year or two… without 10baseT jacks in the rooms and without a business center in which one could connect a laptop).
I stayed in a $300/night Meridien hotel right next to Heathrow airport. They’d just finished an extensive renovation. No 10baseT jacks. No WiFi network. The reception staff were unaware of any way to connect other than dialup.
I visited Cambridge, England, which isn’t a huge city but is supposed to be fairly advanced. I stayed with a professor from the university. On a faculty salary he can’t afford a big house downtown so he lives 7 miles away. That’s too far to get a DSL line and there is no alternative from a cable company or whatever. He had a dialup connection.
Someone whose only goal in visiting the UK was to connect a laptop probably could have done it but my point was mostly that the Internet is non-existent for the casual traveler who is primarily interested in sightseeing.
Compare this to Israel: I’m typing this from a free high-speed link in my hotel in Israel (a beachfront highrise that is 1/4 the price of the Hiltons and Meridiens in the UK). The little airports in the UK did not have Internet connectivity for checking the weather; the flight schools in Israel have Internet browsers around for pilots to use. All the folks that I talked to in Israel had broadband at home. When I plugged my wireless card it always saw at least one network (sadly usually secured).
To answer the preceding comments… I’m glad to hear that the UK has nearly 1000 hotspots but the country is nearly half the size of Texas. If you dropped yourself down in Texas and asked what the probability was of landing on one of 2000 hotspots the answer would be “about the same as the probability of Texans voting to elect Hillary Clinton president”.
Slightly fewer internet subscribers than US per head, true.
but only a few percentage points.
Not much wifi, true.
But only because instead of lugging laptops around we carry mobile phones so we can always be in touch. Not just when we’re drinking overpriced coffee.
Public wireless networks are pretty rare here in the UK. Internet access in hotels is pretty unusual too. But then British hotels are pretty crap, as a rule.
On the other hand, every internet cafe I’ve ever been in has allowed you to connect your own laptop (mind you, I’ve only been in two ;o). Everybody I know and everyone I meet uses the internet, and I live in a pretty rural and backward part of the UK. There are internet cafes in almost every town in the country, never mind just big cities. I understand a number of pubs are introducing wifi networks for the benefit of there customers. So my advice would be to have spent more time drinking while you were here. That way you may tag an internet connection, but at the very least you get a few decent pints in you.
Jeez Duuude, whatsup wit dat! Yall brits are cavemen duuuude, big ups to the yankee homies!
“All the folks that I talked to in Israel had broadband at home.”
Well, Israel’s a very small country with very high population density. Something similar applies to the Netherlands, where broadband came with cable. Cable is a late arrival in Britain (satellite dishes provide most multi-channel TV) and so it’s ADSL for the masses.
When I lived in the US I waited 2 years for ADSL connections. When I moved back to the NL last year I have ADSL righ away.
When I had no problem to find internet cafe even in Cornwall. Granted slow and more expensive than London, but it worked. After all I was only looking for ‘communications’.
I had to learn how to use SMS when I moved back to Europe! While even a 3 years old know what to do!
IN short, every country has different life style. Don’t mean we do not know, just that we do not need it.
If you go to Korea you will be shocked how much more advance they are with telecomm/wireless! And that is in Asia!
Welcome to international travelling.
While it’s true that WiFi isn’t as pervasive (yet) in the UK as it is in the US, it’s getting there. I live in Cambridge (as Mentioned by Philip above) and I have 600Kb broadband from home, and the availability is increasing in radius everyday, with BT providing broadband in rural areas when requests reach a critical mass.
Even at home I have an 802.11g wireless LAN which is just beautiful (but not open – sorry WarChalkers!)
My sister and brother-in-law are farmers in rural Herefordshire and use the net on a daily basis.
But all of this is moot. As our Dutch friend says, the pervasive culture in the UK is to use Mobile (Cell) phones for most communication, because our pricing models in Europe are much more flexible and liberal than they were the last time I checked in the US (this may have changed, so flame me, but you paid to receive calls in the US a while back, and the phone companies said that there was no way they could change this, which was undiluted BS!)
I can send 200 text messages a month in my phone rental package without incurring any additional cost, as well as 200 minutes of cross network calls. And I can be guaranteed to be able to use it pretty much anywhere.
Celebrate our cultural diversity chaps!
2000 hotspots in Texas is nowhere near enough that you could reliably expect to stumble on one when you need it.
The only way you can *rely* on being able to get online while travelling, in *any* country, is dialup. I’ve done two 4000 mile trips across the US, maintaining a daily blog, and an IBM dialup account meant a local POP from almost any motel. I imagine most of these places were 200 miles from the nearest public WiFi hotspot.
A quick search of http://www.hilton.com quickly finds the hoteal in question.
It also shows how internet access is available in guest rooms.
Just because your fellow academic (in Cambridge) chose not to follow up on alternatives to DSL (ISDN, satellite, formed a Wi-Fi cell with someone nearer the exchange, etc), doesn’t mean that you should mark the UK as being a Wi-Fi black-hole.
All this shows, is that you should have researched your connectivity options before your trip.
You cannot afford to assume that the world is covered with 802.11
Being a Brit my response is ‘who f*cking cares’.
Now I know UK hotels are rubbish but, with a bit of ingenuity and a little less of the old ‘serve it to me on a plate or I’ll f*cking moan all day’ attitude you can usually get a connection.
You probably pissed off the hotel staff who thought ‘F*CK him – let’s p*ss him off and pretend he can’t get access’.
Tip from someone in the know. Be more polite. Don’t talk sh*te about the one of the most IT literate countries in Europe (after most Nordic ones – who are, incidentally more online than you ‘folks’ (yee-f*cking-haa). You never know, you might just get the connectivity you ‘need’.
Alternatively you might be wise to remember your way ain’t the only way. The entire world does not necessarily operate to make your life more convenient.
Whining fucking yank. What a streak of piss you are.
As for WiFi – not that bad in the UK relatively speaking:
Global Hotspots Ranking
1 United States (13154)
2 United Kingdom (3650)
3 Japan (954)
4 Germany (705)
5 Taiwan (628)
6 Australia (453)
7 Sweden (435)
8 France (403)
9 Canada (388)
10 Austria (364)
Source: Jiwire http://www.jiwire.com/
No net in the UK? You are a very stupid man.
Try spending less time looking for wi-fi and more time composing comment that doesn’t sneer.
And when you get ‘back home’ do something about your stupid cell phone system. Or did u bring your phone th the UK and complain that didnt work too ?
Internet use is less in the UK because so many damn people have mobiles for text messaging, phone blogging, and what-not. We can’t help it if you Yanks are stuck with your bulky web servers and RSS and other over-engineered malarky.
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