The Roaming Blues
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Travelers to and from Japan can find communicating with home to be frustrating. If these frustrations could be prioritized, the annoyance of unreliable e-mail access may be second only to the problems caused by the time difference with Japan. Fortunately for the nomadic traveler, roaming services, POP3 mail servers, and universal-access Web-based e-mail services are slowly appearing to ease the problem.
by Dick Weisinger You probably use e-mail. and you probably are hooked on it-I know I am. E-mail has become a ubiquitous and important business communication tool. It's not hard to see why: e-mail is simple to use, the delivery time for messages seems almost instantaneous, and the cost is relatively cheap. You may not actually realize how dependent you've become on the convenience of e-mail until you travel, especially when you travel internationally. Suddenly, all of the simplicity and convenience you're used to becomes a chore. For example, when I travel, I'm usually too busy during the day to find the time or even a place to hook up my laptop computer to check my e-mail, so my only opportunity to do so is in the evening at the hotel. Because I'm normally used to checking e-mail three or more times a day, traveling on a reduced e-mail schedule can give me anxiety attacks. But the problems of remotely accessing e-mail don't end simply by finding a block of time and a free phone line. How many times have you heard stories of people struggling to log onto their e-mail accounts from non-digital-friendly hotel phones? Or how about slow connect and download times? And random disconnects twenty minutes into the download. (If you haven't heard any, I have a few stories that I can tell you.) International dialing from hotels has been improving, but still, finding effective and reasonably cheap access to e-mail and the Internet while traveling can be a problem. Roaming Internet and e-mail access by international phone calls is costly and a major hassle. Over the last couple of years, Internet providers began uniting globally to attempt to relieve some of that stress for international travelers. The availability of roaming services by providers is becoming increasingly common. The idea behind Internet roaming is similar to cellular phone roaming - no matter where you go globally, there is always a local phone number that you can dial to gain access to the Internet. You use the same login name and password no matter where you are. Once logged in, you have access to Internet services like e-mail and the Web the same way you normally do and you receive only one bill for all charges. Because the connection is made with a local call, compared to making an international call, roaming can mean savings on phone charges and access to higher quality connections. The first time I heard about roaming was in early 1997. I had been using a $19.95 unlimited access account with Microsoft's MSN Internet Access service and was sent to Japan on a three-month assignment. When I found out that Microsoft had access-point numbers in Tokyo, I was thrilled and during my stay kept current with events in the US daily by using my MSN account. During that period, MSN was experiencing glitches with their billing service--in fact I didn't see any charges on my credit card for those months in Japan until three months after returning to the US. Then, for three subsequent credit card billings, I saw MSN charges, each of about $700. I called MSN to remind them that I was a $19.95 unlimited user. To my surprise, the reason for the high charges was "roaming." Each minute of MSN access from outside of the US incurred roaming service charges. That was news to me. I eventually managed to convince MSN of my ignorance and the charges were dropped, but it definitely made me consider other means of Internet and e-mail access when outside the US. This is not to say that roaming is bad, but for my situation it was not the right choice. Depending on how long you will be traveling and also on your need to access Internet resources, it may or may not make sense. Roaming charges are typically \10 to \20 per minute. Compare that to an unlimited-access account in Japan. For example, an account from AT&T Jens World (http://www.computingjapan.com/resources/providers/providers.html.) Just a few hours of Internet connect time may justify the cost of signing up for a local Internet access account. Roaming is ideal for the traveler who needs Internet access from many countries and prefers a single billing, or those travelers who need only limited short-term Internet access at an international location. If roaming is for you, there are increasingly more providers and online services offering its capability. For example, GRIC World Online (www.gol.com). Simlar to the GRIC Internet roaming alliance are services provided by Ipass, Geoaccess Communications, and eGlobe. IPass (www.inter.net.il/ipass) boasts of 300 member companies offering 2500 dial-in access points in 150 countries. Geoaccess Communications (http://www.eglobe.com) provides Internet roaming services as well as unified messaging capabilities for retrieving, managing and responding to all e-mail, voice mail and fax messages, and is accessible via the Web or any touch-tone phone. MSN and AOL can also be reached through access point numbers in Japan. E-mail Forwarding and POP3 Mail Servers Setting up a local Internet account at your travel destination makes Web access affordable and more trouble-free, but how do you get access to e-mail from your company or home-based Internet provider? Your new local Internet account will probably come with its own e-mail address, but using multiple e-mail addresses will only confuse the people with whom you correspond. Further, when you stop checking e-mail at one location, you may be missing e-mail being sent to that location. A simple fix for this problem is to ask the system administrator managing your e-mail account to forward all of your e-mail to the other address while you are traveling. This may be all you need to solve the problem. But, if you are traveling a lot, coordinating with your system administrator may be difficult. If forwarding is enabled too soon or too late, you may miss seeing some of your mail. A better solution is available if your home-based e-mail is based on a POP3 mail server. A POP3 mail server is the computer at your Internet provider where your incoming e-mail is stored until you download it to your computer to read. Outgoing e-mail is sent out over the Internet via an SMTP mail server. POP3 and SMTP mail servers on the Internet can be reached independently of the dial-in Internet provider you use. In your e-mail software, you can specify the Internet POP3 and SMTP server-name connect information. If you always need access to the same POP3 server and if you bring your laptop computer along with you when you travel, after you dial into a local provider, without changing any of your e-mail settings, the software will be able to locate the mail servers. Access to more than one POP3 mail server is easy too. For example, Outlook Express, Microsoft's e-mail program that comes free when you download their Internet Explorer 4.0 Web Browser (http://www.hotmail. com) which has more than eight million users. It was bought by Microsoft in late 1997 and has features that are similar to that of standard e-mail software packages. Hotmail even has standard access to POP3 mail servers. Time Warner's Pathfinder Network (http://www.pathfinder.com) also offers free universal-access e-mail accounts. For US$14.95, you can choose a vanity e-mail address from one of 300 options like xxx@cyber-wizard.com. Other large providers of free web-based e-mail accounts include Net@ddress (http://www.netaddress.com) and Yahoo's Rocketmail (http:///www.rocketmail.com). Keep in mind that depending on the provider, there are limitations on the size and number of e-mail attachments allowed. Another potential problem with the US-based services mentioned so far is the potential lack of support for double-byte Japanese text. For example, HotMail does not officially support any language other than English. The support person there told me he wasn't sure about Japanese support and advised me to just try it. Actually, I didn't experience any problem sending or receiving Japanese in my experiments with any of these services, but if being able to exchange Japanese in messages is important to you, you might consider using Japan-based NTT's ProntoMail (http://www.prontomail.ne.jp/jpn/login/ntti.asp). One tip if you need to be able to read Web pages in Japanese (including Web-based e-mail) is the multilingual capability of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4.0. There are localized versions of IE 4.0 available, including Japanese, which are specifically created for localized versions of the Windows operating system. But even if you are using an English version of Windows with the English version of IE 4.0, you can still display Japanese, Korean, Chinese and other European language Web pages by downloading the appropriate fonts (http:// www.microsoft.com/ie/ie40/download). Summary Dependence on the Internet by business and sophisticated users who travel internationally has created a demand for reliable Web and e-mail access. That demand is slowly being met with the introduction of roaming Internet access, POP3 mail servers, and universal-access Web-based e-mail services. Have a nice trip... Dick Weisinger is a Senior Software Engineer at Lockheed Martin Global, Inc. in Tokyo and is the technical liaison for FORMTEK International, a Lockheed Martin subsidiary, and its software distributors in Japan. He can be reached at dickw@tkb.att.ne.jp.
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