I am taking my laptop to London, as I am coming from a business trip.

I want to go online a few times a day. Hotel offers flat rate of GBP20 per day, far more time than I need or want to pay.

Would prefer to go online in hotel room (vs cyber cafe) if low-cost way. Has anyone done that?

I'm not sure I follow. But I'll try.

Your hotel charges GBP20 per day (I assume in your room) and now you want advice for cheaper online connection rate in the same hotel room?

There's usually only one way to connect online from one's room and that is the one that the hotel will charge for and in the case of your hotel, GBP20. You may have to move to another hotel to get a cheaper internet rate. Other hotels may charge a lower per-day cost (for example, Marriots in the US charge $9.95 for high speed DSL connection, others for $12.95, while Hyatt has freebies for frequent guests members).

The alternative for low use in a hotel room is to take on a British pay-as-you-go option.

ISPs like tesco.net and freeserve.com charge the phone subscriber a slightly higher than normal charge (which will then be passed on to you at whatever inflated rate the hotel chooses: typically the gotel will be charged 1-1.5 pence per minute, and will charge you 25-50 p per minute)

You can sign up for these pay as you go schemes for free, from your home country. Once in London, you can decide whether the rate your hotel charges "free" calls back to you works out cheaper than their block daily rate.

Alternatively, if you have a mobile phone that works in the UK, you can simply access these ISPs through your mobile phone.

Or you can use WiFi. Much of London is so densely populated that a room in hotel A will be in the hot zone of an adjacent internet cafe, or of hotel B that offers a WiFi service.

I'd leave the laptop and go to an internet cafe instead. When I was there last year, I found places that charged 1 GBP per hour. That should be plenty. No use wasting all that money.

Karen

Thank you all for such good information.

It does seem the most economical thing would be to go to an internet cafe.

I'm on AT&T here and can access messages at its site. Will I need to know or do anything special to get it? I've not used internet in another country before.

thank you.

I still find a laptop very convenient to have, though I basically never try using it for connecting to the internet per se. Most internet cafes will allow you to carry in a diskette, so that you can more quickly send e-mail (that you have already composed at your leisure), and capture those that you receive - - to think about and answer, also more leisurely.

Best wishes,

Rex

I think you all may be talking about two different things here. That 20 pound charge is presumably for hooking up their their high speed connection. If you have something like AOL or earthlink dial up service (I have Earthlink DSL at home, but can dial up when traveling) then it should only cost you the cost of the phone call to dial up from your room. Since companies like AOL and earthlink and many others have local dial up numbers, it shouldn't be expensive, but of course you still need to check with the hotel to see what they will charge you for a local call. I'm in a flat in London, and last year logged on a lot from there using my earthlink dial up. It didn't cost a penny -- but of course, the flat didn't charge me for making local calls.

And if you don't have AOL, you can always go pick up one of those free trial discs somewhere that gives you 45 days of unlimited service, download it, and use it with a dial up when you travel.

If you use dial-up and connect through your hotel room phone jack ... I'm not sure if hotel telephone wiring system can receive/transmit data (i.e. connect through to the Internet)!

Certainly, not here in the States.

That's why they offer those high-speed DSL or Wi-fi connections for a daily fee. Those with DSL services even provide cable connectors in their clothes closet.

I've always travelled to London iwth a laptop, and never used it for Internet connections. The cafes, etc., are just so much easier for checking email and doing a bit of surfing.

As you say you're new to this, you might find useful a short section about getting connected that I put on my webpage about planning trips to the UK:

http://victorianresearch.org/trip.html#net

If anyone notices mistakes or omissions, I'd be glad to know about them.

Cuttle