WiFi overseas...

Hi Andrew,

Yes you can hook into any Wi-Fi hotspot with your iPhone. Make sure you turn your data roaming OFF. They charge like wounded bulls when overseas.
Last year we got a bill for $1000 and we only turned our data roaming on for a few times when we needed to get access.

Regards

Robert & Karen

Hi Andrew, we are currently in France and have no trouble connecting our PC to WiFi networks. One word of caution, They are Not secured sites, similar to WiFi sites in WA. You can connect to secure sites in most hotels or B&B places. Some will charge a per half hour connection fee. You can use your mobile phone for roaming calls, but keep call time to a minimum. Best to use a laptop PC to send and receive emails. Just let me know if you have more questions. Cheers

When we book hotels on the go, we try and make sure they have free wifi. If we are in any country for a few weeks, we get a pre paid data sim with whatever is their best carrier and take our sim out of the phone. Once you cross a border the sim starts roaming and chews your allowance. Having a local sim is by far the best option for internet because we have found wifi pretty iffy in a lot of spots so we fall back to the sim. It always seems we need internet when we aren't in a hotspot as well :-)

Andrew,
Wifi will work fine if data roaming disabled. We used our iphone right through South America taking advantage of free WIfi at almost all the hoels we stayed in. Great technology.

Enjoy the holiday

Andrew just mention what country and we might be about to give specific advice to that country

Out of interest, we were in Vietnam and Malaysia for 3 weeks in November and every second cafe had free Wifi and it was free in most hotels.
Why on earth Australian Hotels charge an arm and a leg for it, I do not know.

Hi Andrew,
We went to the USA last September and made some incorrect assumptions about how best to get use mobile data etc. Here is a blog we wrote upon our return with all our lessons to share with others with the same needs.

Here is the link to the whole blog: USA Reflection Blog

Here is a snippet of relevance to you:
INTERNET/MOBILE DATA

American businesses offers free Wi-fi for customers (on your receipt you'll get the password) so without a data plan on your mobile, you can get internet service at most coffee shops, grocery stores, restaurants, clubs, airports, motels/hotels, in fact you'll get it at most retail and entertainment precincts. Interesting, that in contrast this sort of service is so limited in Australia.

There was just one problem... many of the hotels we stayed at advertised "free high-speed internet"... and we got tricked into thinking that meant wi-fi. The speed of wi-fi connections varied considerably, and many just didn't have the range to offer good service beyond the foyer. With that said however, these hotels offered an ethernet plug, but not the cable to plug into it. Big mistake on our part! That would have been the perfect solution for free internet.

Anyway, the point is not to bother sorting out a mobile internet data plan. It appears that American telecommunications industry just isn't going down this path as we have in Australia. You can't just walk into a supermarket, airport, or department store and get bombarded with an array of pre-paid data plan options. In fact, it took us 2 days in Vegas of asking questions and hunting around shops to find such a thing and when we did, it cost $75 for the plan plus a $10 account setup. Even if you could afford that, the problem is that you will find it hard to actually use it anywhere. The mobile data speed we encountered throughout the state of California in particular was so slow it was unusable to browse the internet on our iPhones so we found our free hotel wi-fi to be the better solution.

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HOpe this helps,
Michelle

Thanks to all who replied, great help.

In the USA, get a T-Mobile prepaid Sim card, $US60 from memory, free calls for a month in the USA plus 100MB Data (early last year). Your phone MUST be unlocked to use it. If your phone in OZ is locked, it will not work with a overseas SIM card.

I have used pre-pay in NZ, USA and Singapore, all with no problems.

I do not regard WiFi or internet in cafes, hotels, public places, etc as secure enough for banking so I don't do it. Use the Phone with local SIM card to tether your laptop/tablet off to do banking.

If you are taking a laptop, take your own Ethernet cable as not every hotel has Wifi but may have Ethernet.

SKYPE is a MUST to use over the Wifi, and Skype Out is also good to have so you can call normal landlines from Skype cheap as.

Stevesub

Andrew,

I have recently bought a Galaxy Tab to take on our OS holiday,
The advice I got from the young bloke at JB Hi-Fi was to purchase a prepaid sim card in the Country being visited. If no "free" wi-fi is around the tablet will connect via the simcard at local rates.