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I’ve just spent the last hour or so going through my last-minute check-list of things to sort out before I fly to India on Friday to kick-off some new projects with our Software Development teams over there.

One of the things on my list was “Investigate cost effective WiFi service at Heathrow and Doha Airports”. As I spend a lot of time travelling on trains and in airports, I often need access to the Internet from my laptop (when Internet access on my phone isn’t quite enough). The usual answer to this is to pay £5 a go for an hour’s worth of WiFi Hotspot access on BT Openzone (using my PlusNet WiFi minutes), T-Mobile or The Cloud or whatever else is in range; hardly a cost effective way of doing things.

My investigation lead me to some interesting software that I can install on my phone that will turn my phone into a WiFi hotspot. I can then connect to this hotspot with my laptop and surf away.

The good news? The software is free and I don’t pay for data usage on my phone.

For those people that are interested in this sort of thing:
• The software is called Joiku
• My laptop is a very small Sony Vaio; Great for taking on the plane.
• My phone is a Nokia N95 8GB

There are a few limitations, mainly that the Joiku software only works with HTTP and HTTPS traffic, so if I want Instant Messaging access I need to use Fring on my phone or a browser Instant Messaging interface such as Meebo, but I can live with that.

If anyone else has any recommendations that can beat this then I’d be very pleased to hear from you. I’ll report back with my findings as to how well (or otherwise) this goes…

Matt Grest
Head of Future Development
PlusNet

Twitter: MattGrest

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