Are you heading to London this July/August along with thousands of people worldwide? If you answered yes, you have come to the right place!
We’ve located some convenient hotspots near popular sports venues to get you connected in between watching the games (or in between meetings). Be sure to watch your favorite sports, but also take in various areas of London, such as the City of London, the medieval core, the City of Westminster (and city-wide Wi-Fi) or Stratford, the site of a new, major sporting complex and housing area.
More so, we have partnered with The Cloud and BT Wi-fi to create our Top 10 Favorite Hotspots for you located in restaurants, hotels, or just outdoor Wi-Fi connected areas; don’t worry—we’ve got you covered.
The O2 Arena, one sporting venue, is not only open late, but did you know that you could fill it with 3.8 billion pints of beer or the contents of 1100 olympic-sized swimming pools?
Have you ever taken a 14 hour red-eye only to get off and head straight to a business meeting?
It can be hard, not to mention if you’re flying in Economy Class (aka coach). When I think of a coach, I think of the Queen of England sitting in her royal carriage. However, I definitely don’t feel like I’m getting the royal treatment in coach on an airplane. Crammed into a small seat, you’re forced to become best friends with the person sitting next to you, and make awkward small talk. With the various aromas (bathroom, food, the person next to you…) and sounds (coughing, crying, drumbeats), it can be hard to get comfortable on your flight.
The worst part is the amount of money you are paying for these seats. A nonstop roundtrip ticket from San Francisco to New York City (JFK) runs at about $500 for economy class depending on when you book. So yes, you’re paying for unappealing food, smelly surroundings, and claustrophobic seats. But you’re also paying to travel cross the country – or in the case of the 14 hour flight, to a foreign country. Is that good enough? Does that mean the entire trip was worth it? And now, after being up all night with a hundred or more other people, you’re off to a business meeting. It’s rough.
While we cannot improve all aspects of your flight, we can help with Internet connectivity. iPass Open Mobile allows you to connect with the internet while cruising through the air. Check your email, get some work done, and try and get your mind off of the fellow passenger on your right.
However, some people argue that the plane may be the one place where you can be away from work. So it’s your choice. But remember, you can always chat family and friends, using iPass Open Mobile—it doesn’t have to be work related! (We won’t tell!)
This week, Chris Churilo and I have pledged to go without cellular data and to use only Wi-Fi.
We began Monday morning upon arriving at work, and are going to try and last until Friday night without turning the Airplane Mode setting off of our smart phones. Initially I thought it would be easy— I don’t talk on the phone very much, and I can use the iPhone’s iMessage function to “text” others as long as their iPhones are running the latest iOS update.
But I began to feel the strain as I left work and realized on the commute home that I was completely off the grid without Wi-Fi.
Upon making it home, it hit me just how few people are running the same iOS update as I, and even less using apps that allow text-like messages sent back and forth between users.
I was struck by how without the 3G or 4G functionality, my smartphone was in essence no more than a small computer. It’s convenient when I was at work or on-the-go in a public area with Wi-Fi, but quickly abandoned when I had the opportunity to use my laptop.
Being unreachable via phone call or regular text message also gave me the illusion that I had many missed calls and unanswered texts from people who would be taken aback by my lack of response for an entire week. In fact, the temptation to turn my phone off of Airplane Mode for a second just to see what calls and texts I had missed was almost unbearable—I may have even cheated on my Wi-Fi diet were it not for the iPass Open Mobile client’s Usage Meter graphing my usage of cellular and Wi-Fi data.
Here is my Usage Meter as of this blog post. We started the Wi-Fi diet yesterday, July 9th, and you can see my small tab of cellular data from the morning before I came into work. My usage for today, the 10th, is entirely Wi-Fi. You can also see that I’ve used as much data this morning as I did all of yesterday. I wonder how many megabytes of data I will have used by the end of the day.
Even more pressing is the big question: Will I last using only Wi-Fi for the rest of the day? The week? Wish me luck!
As iPass employees, Zoe Paknad and I spend a lot of time thinking and talking about Wi-Fi. We both have the iPass Open Mobile client downloaded on our smart phones and are frequent enough users of it. One day, it occurred to us– what would happen if we chose Wi-Fi over 3G every single day for a week? Could it be done?
We decided to try it out, and we’re calling it the Wi-Fi diet. The Wi-Fi diet means putting our smart phones on Airplane Mode and enabling the Wi-Fi setting so that we can only use Wi-Fi. For phone calls, we can use a voiceover IP service. For texts, an app. For a week we will say goodbye to the traditional smartphone experience, so that we can attempt to operate in the way of the future—using only Wi-Fi.
Throughout this journey, we will chronicle all of the obstacles we may encounter. Is it as difficult as everyone says? Are the savings on our phone bills substantial? To prove our commitment and demonstrate our progress, we will show our data usage via the Open Mobile’s clients Usage Meter—so we can see exactly how much data we are using and ensure that we never accidentally use 3G.
Will we last the whole week without cellular data? Stay tuned for this week’s Wi-Fi diet with Zoe and Chris!
Most likely, you are, as business travel is not necessarily a requirement. Do you check your smartphone frequently? Does it sleep nearby at night? Do you feel unproductive when you are not connected?
Are you heading to London this July/August along with thousands of people worldwide? If you answered yes, you have come to the right place!
