AC power and phone adapters needed for computer notebooks overseas

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Travails of a cyber road warrior

By Richard Morochove

First published August 6, 1998

It's not always easy to get online when on the road. Incompatible electrical and telephone systems seem to conspire to keep you disconnected. If you've had problems hooking up when out of town, here are a few cybertips for road warriors I've picked up along the way.

You face no big problems if you're travelling in Canada or the U.S. Most business hotel rooms include a telephone with a dataport that features an RJ11 jack so you can plug in your modem cable. In some smaller centres and resorts, a dataport telephone isn't available in every room. You should make a special request for one when making a room reservation.

Check with your Internet Service Provider (ISP) about a local POP (Point of Presence) in the area you'll visit. While you can always call up long distance to check your E-mail, a local dial-up number will be considerably less expensive.

When you travel outside North America, the issues become more complex. In Europe and many other parts of the world, you'll be faced with an electric system that delivers 240 volts, double the 120 volts standard in Canada.

Thankfully, most notebook computers manufactured in the last few years can handle the higher voltage. To be sure, check the fine print on the "power brick" that usually connects your notebook to the AC power. If the fine print says it can accommodate 240Vac and 50Hz input, then you're set.

Even if your notebook can handle 240 volts, you'll still need to get a plug that can fit into overseas electric outlets. A plug that accepts the flat prongs used in Canada and converts them to the round ones used in Europe costs just 2 or 3 dollars and is commonly available in travel shops.

Hooking up to retrieve your E-mail is more complicated. There is no European standard phone jack. While Spain uses the North American RJ11, France, Germany and the United Kingdom all use different, incompatible phone jacks. Be sure to pick up a phone converter plug before you leave, at a cost of about $10 or so.

In many parts of the world outside North America the older pulse dialing system is still in common use, while it's been largely supplanted by touchtone dialing in Canada. Check this out when you place a voice call in your hotel room. If you hear a series of clicks when dialing, you'll need to switch your modem from tone to pulse dialing.

In Windows 95, you can change your modem dialing method in the Control Panel. Select Modems, then change the Dialing Properties by clicking on the pulse dialing option.

Finding a local POP for your ISP is more difficult in Europe than in North America. It isn't getting any easier with the withdrawal of the Microsoft Network from Europe this past Spring. While my ISP, Netcom Canada, has hundreds of POPs in Canada and the U.S., in Europe it's limited to the U.K.

On a recent trip to Paris, one of my group dialed into Netcom's London POP to check her E-mail and racked up quite a phone tab. I used the CompuServe network, which has a fairly extensive international network of its own, along with relationships with many national telecommunication companies.

CompuServe's local Paris dial up number allowed me to connect to the Internet cheaply and download messages from my Netcom mailbox. I used CompuServe to provide "Internet dialtone" and not for its E-mail service. My CompuServe mailbox is limited to 100 messages, which I find ludicrously small considering I receive 150 E-mail messages on an average business day.

There's potentially one more catch. Netcom Canada, like some other ISPs, does not allow you to send E-mail through its mail server when you're out of the country and not using its own dial-up network. It considers this to be mail relaying, which is a common trick of spammers who send unsolicited commercial E-mail. While I could retrieve E-mail from my Netcom account easily enough, I had to send my E-mail through another E-mail account.

While this sounds rather complicated, it was fairly easy to accomplish with Microsoft's Outlook Express. The latest version of this program allows you to send and receive E-mail for multiple Internet E-mail accounts in one pass.

Was it worth it to carry around a fistful of phone and electrical converters and fiddle with modem configurations? I found I was able to effectively respond to my client's messages. Many didn't even realize I was thousands of kilometers away.

If I can view the Mona Lisa in the afternoon and follow it up with an evening dinner cruise on the river Seine, fiddling with converters that help keep the home fires burning seems a small price to pay. CW

Richard Morochove, FCA, is a Toronto-based computer consultant.

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