The first 3 hours
When I get into a new country, I have a routine for getting connected onto the local mobile network and the Internet. So here’s my routine for the US:
- – Find an AT&T store. You can go to a dealer, but I find the AT&T stores are the most knowledgeable. Ask for a GoPhone Pay as You Go prepaid SIM card. If you have an iPhone4, ask for a micro-SIM. You’ll need to put some calling credits – it’s $2 a day, so buy as much as you need
- – If you want to have data access on your mobile (e.g. iPhone), you’ll need to pay an additional $20 for 100MB. It’s expensive but there’s no alternative that I know of. You can do this in store or you can just add the $20 to your new account and transfer $20 to the data access feature via the GoPhone web site later
- – Pop the new SIM card in and you’re done. You can login to http://att.com/mygophone check your account and add features like data
Now, this what I do when I get into my hotel room:
- – Check the speed of the in-house Internet. Most hotels will have wired and wireless. The wireless is often much slower because of the equipment and other infrastructure slow downs. If so, I use an Airport Express base station I usually carry with me. Use a site like http://speedtest.net/ to test the speed
Posted on Monday, April 18th, 2011 at 4:26 am. Filed under: New York City, Tutorial, USA RSS 2.0 feed.
