3G Roaming Plans for tomorrow’s Road Tour.

Tomorrow,  I’ll be doing some driving.  Actually quite a lot of driving. I’ll be driving through 5 countries in about 12 hours and while I do it I hope to keep you updated on where I am, what i’m doing and use a MID to generate and post-process all the info into a nice media stream. One of the challenges will be navigation. Another challenge will be staying online.  I’m quite sure that the 3G coverage will be good but i’m also sure that the cost is going to be high. Current charges for roaming data in Europe are just stupid. 4 Euro per megabyte is a standard charge if you havent set any roaming deals up and it goes way higher than that if you mess up use the wrong access point. Ideally there would be a virtual provider in Europe that could sell you a pre-pay SIM and offer cheap data across all EU countries but so far I haven’t found anything. Instead i’ll be signing up for 24-hour roaming sessions. For 14,95 I can roam for 24 hours with Vodafone.  Not bad is it! Until you read the bit that says ‘max 50MB’ compared to the 4.95 they charge for a full day’s in-country flat rate, it’s almost criminal!

I can eat 50MB in minutes on a MID so I’m going to have to be extremely careful. I had an option to use another 50MB on a special T-Mobile card but when I tried it the other day I got charged per megabyte. The website is unclear about my data options and as I write the part of the site that tells me my options is down so I won’t be risking it with T-Mobile tomorrow. That leaves me with quite a challenge.
I’ll be OK in my home country of course but the mad dash from Luxemborg through France, Holland and Belgium will be a challenge. I wonder how much I can squeeze out of 50MB. Will I still be able to provide you with live positioning data? Will I remember to compress my photos before sending them to flickr and will I be able to do a few quick podcasts?

Planned route is below but I’ll be making a live map mashup as I go tomorrow.

Update: Live map and Google map produced. Available here. 

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