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Technology Stocks : PC Sector Round Table -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mark Oliver who wrote (1260)	12/9/1998 7:50:00 PM
From: Stitch	Respond to of 2025

Mark; <<, how do you travel around maintaining all your internet accesses?>> I have two providers in Malaysia (the only two, which I use because of a high incidence of technical problems) and one in the U.S. All of them offer a "roaming" service that functions in the same fashion. This involves their participation in a world wide service of some type. I am able to download some dialer software and a phone listing. In each city, I simply open the dialer and select the city. This gives me a list of the providers there that participate. I am also able to compare rates. Each participating provider charges an hourly rate that may vary but I haven't found one yet that I thought was way overcharged. Most are around 50 cents an hour. After selecting the city and provider (selected on the basis of phone access and hourly rate) I just double click it and the software sets up the win 95/98 connection. My UserID shows the provider that I am a roaming customer and the software provides the ISP with the appropriate access to my home providers security server. The connection takes a little longer then normal as my password and ID are checked against my home servers tables. When I leave that city and go to another I simply delete that connection from Win98's "dial up networking" and set up the new city connection. The software and the associated providers take care of all the accounting and the charges show up on my provider's statement as "roaming" charges" with a break down of the time log and point of connection. As I said I have found it to be quite reasonable. Something to watch out for however is the rate the hotel charges for local calls. This can mount up in some hotels and I have learned to check this aspect of a hotel's service before I make my reservation. If local calls are not provided or , at a maximum, are charged at a nominal rate per call, I do not stay there. One of these "global consolidators" is a company called iPass. Here is a link to a fairly recent story about them or you can go direct to their homepage in the second link. They are still in their VC capitalization stage but I expect to see a public offering from them sometime down the road. www4.zdnet.com ipass.com Best, Stitch