[CQ-Contest] ISP for world use

[Barry Merrill]

1.  I looked at the majors, and found Earthlink had the
    best coverage in Europe for local phone numbers,
    and the per-minute connection fee (billed after the
    fact, and with periodic notices of how much you've
    used) was modest.

2. If you have your email at a real POP3/SMTP site,
   (as opposed inside AOL and similar buffer services),
   you can dial into any ISP to retrieve your email from
   your home-ISPs POP3 address, although you will 
   likely have to change the SMTP address in your email
   program's options to name the new-ISP's SMTP address 
   to be able to send email.

   So you can use your friends userid/password to
   connect to his/her local ISP in their town,
   and receive and send your email.

3. Purchase a one-month account with a local ISP
   to access the internet, and retrieve your email
   from your home ISP.  I did that for the Teluride
   Blue Grass festival, when there was no local
   access for Earthlink.  For $20 the local ISP
   (yellow pages!) gave me a connection, which was
   much less than 5 days long distance calls.

4. If you use hotel phones, read their rate card
   VERY CAREFULLY.  Most hotels now have a fixed
   charge for the first N minutes of each local
   call (like a  buck for the first 20 minutes),
   but beyond some units of time, instate a per
   minute charge.  Leaving a logon up all night
   can be a $50 phone bill.


Barry, W5GN
 


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