Communications
Just a few years ago, keeping in touch with family and friends back home while traveling was an expensive and somewhat irregular process. Today, the explosive growth of the internet, cellular telecommunications, and satellites have made our world smaller and has made it easier than ever to stay in touch from almost anywhere in the world. Let’s first look at the easiest and least expensive way to stay in touch.
Internet Cafes
It is now possible to find an internet cafe almost anywhere in the world. In large and medium size cities, internet cafes are relatively prevalent with reasonably inexpensive access. Once outside the larger cities, however, internet access can be a little more difficult to find—particularly in third and fourth world countries. If you ever find yourself in one of those few places in the world where the internet hasn’t reached yet and you need access, the first place you should look are in the largest hotels where business travelers would stay or on university campuses. Any reliable guidebook will tell you where at least one or two internet cafes are located in any city. Bear in mind that internet cafes tend to come and go and any place listed in a guidebook could very well have closed down.
If you use an internet cafe, it is important to keep in mind that we (as in all of us) still live very much in a Microsoft-centric world and that almost all machines you will find throughout the world are Windows-based. If you’ve been a diehard Mac or Linux user your whole life and have limited experience with Windows-based machines, you should definitely learn at least the basics before you leave.
To make things as easy as possible, it’s best to have a web-based e-mail account rather than relying on a POP3 server (which usually pulls mail off a server to a local machine using a program such as Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes) or your home country ISP account. The most reliable web-based accounts are undoubtedly Hotmail and Yahoo!, both of which are free. Google’s Gmail seems to work well also. It has been reported that some AOL users have had difficulty connecting in various countries.
Hotmail is considered by many to be the most reliable web-based e-mail service throughout the world (probably due to Microsoft’s global dominance) followed closely by Yahoo! and Gmail. Setting up an account is a straightforward process with any of these (although with Gmail you need to be invited by a current user). Hotmail’s free service provides you with limited storage space on its servers which can make sending and receiving larger files difficult (i.e. pictures, large documents, movie clips). For a relatively small annual fee, you can get larger storage capacity, the ability to attach large files, and better protection against spam. Yahoo! provides larger storage free of charge although some users have reported problems receiving mail late or not at all.