Nowhere else is mobility more central than when travelling abroad, away from your familiar services and surroundings. It would therefore be perfectly natural to assume that the traveller segment would be the one that mobile service providers would be actively looking to cater for. Yet the reality is completely the opposite: mobile operators are making sure that no sane person uses mobile data while travelling abroad, thanks to the ridiculous prices of data roaming.

Going on the road? Let’s burn the books & switch off

Last week I was travelling in Macedonia, a potential candidate for becoming an EU member. An exotic location to some extent, as I hadn’t been to any of the former Yugoslavia countries, but at the same time not too distant from the average central European culture. Skopje, their capital city, is not exactly on the top 20 list of cities for tourists to visit, so there wasn’t any paper guidebooks available to take with me. I did download the Skopje In Your Pocket guidebook into my Kindle, but the painful rendering of PDF magazines on the small black & white ePaper screen meant I hardly opened the document. Instead I decided to try and rely on content that I could use on my HTC Desire HD.

The price for mobile data use in Macedonia was according to my Finnish operator’s (DNA) pages a bit over 10 euros per megabyte. Ok, so the first thing to do before boarding the plane was to disable all APN information to make sure that zero bytes would be transferred over the mobile operators’ networks. Hey, what else is new?

A key criteria in selecting our hotel in Skopje had been the availability and visitor ratings on free WiFi connectivity. Even if there was to be no hotspots discovered while out on the town, at least the hotel would serve as a home base for downloading information on sights to see and pubs to visit. In preparation for the times without a network, I had installed the Maps(-) app from Androind Market and downloaded offline Google maps data of the city.

Fortunately it was not too difficult to discover open, free WiFi networks while walking in the center of Skopje. Cafes and shopping centers tended to frequently have a network of decent quality. Outdoor signs of a free T-Mobile hotspot being available to the customers made selecting the restaurants quite a bit easier.

(Non-)Economics of data roaming

During the 3 day visit I ranked up in total 300 MB of data transfer over WiFi. While I did frequently perform Google searches, check into Foursquare (and of course Untappd while going round the pubs!), browse FB/Twitter streams etc., none of the use was particularly data intensive. No video or audio transmitter, just your everyday transactions with applications that have become a part of my daily routine.

How much would have all this mobile data connectivity cost if I had stayed APN enabled and used the 3G network provided by the local telecom operator? Over 3000 euros. Wow. That’s ten times more than what I paid for the flights and hotel altogether. I could have travelled around the world with that money.

How much did I end up paying for the mobile data connectivity while travelling in Macedonia? Zero euros. That’s right, the local economy received more of my money through bubblegum purchases than through offering me telecommunications services.

How much value did I receive from having a mobile device with Internet connection available to me during my travels? Quite a lot, and I expect that value only to increase in the future when the apps and databases available become even more useful. Would I have been willing to pay something for the convenience of not having to hunt for hotspots and just rely on an always-on 3G data connection. Of course I would have!

So, what was your business again?

Call it what you want and reason it how ever which way you like, but in my eyes the continuing state of data roaming pricing in Europe (and of course globally in most places) deserves to be labeled as pure insanity. Insanity particularly therefore that the operators are continuing to do the same thing (preserving an ancient “per MB” pricing model) and expect different results (more revenue from mobile application users).

When debating over the right price point for mobile data plans, the operators all around the world are nowadays trying to claim they can’t offer “all you can eat” pricing anymore due to the increase of smartphones and the lack of 3G/4G network capacity. While there may be a hint of truth in that, it’s important to remember this doesn’t in any way justify the exorbitant pricing of data roaming. Foreign users are at any given time and location going to represent only a fraction of the total user volume for an operator. All the investments needed are in the billing systems and agreements between operators.

The real leasson from this sad situation is that in order to make money through service innovations you don’t necessarily need any new technology. The technology for providing effortless mobile Internet connectivity to tourists has already been built and paid for. Nothing is missing, except offering the service in the form of a feasible product. At the same time, the Internet (as a conscious entity, in the vain of Skynet, Google et al) is working its way around this lack of operator products by making it increasingly easy for local entrepreneurs to punch holes into this firewall by setting up open WiFi hotspots. These holes provide connections to the backbone network of mostly the very same operators and allow the tasty app juice of our post-PC era cloud applications to flow into the mobile devices of vigilant vistors.

Everywhere you go, the cloud follows

Ok, so you may not always have high quality connection to the web, meaning you can’t rely on it to be always there to answer your questions, but the same goes for 3G connections as well. GPRS is in many ways equal to “no connection”, at least when you consume on average 100 MB of data per day. Once you do have a working connection, the big clouds are all there for you to reach into, with their unlimited and ever evolving means of communication and information discovery.

It’s good to note that not even the ancient technology of SMS was reliable enough to be transmitted between Finland and Macedonia, as many messages were delayed or remained missing. At the same time, whenever I had access to Gmail or Facebook I was able to utilize their full feature set as if I had been sitting at home, typing on my laptop. In short, there wasn’t anything that I wanted to do but was unable to do when equipped with my Android smartphone instead of lugging around a mini-PC.

Feel free to disagree, but to me that is a sure sign of the coming post-PC era where both the traditional telecom operator services such as phone calls & text messages as well as traditional keyboard + mouse + monitor + CD-ROM computing paradigms are in danger of slowly becoming extinct. I won’t be living without a “PC” or leave home without a “phone”, but I’ll care less and less about services built specifically around those old conceptual silos. I will just replace them with “everything”, which means anyone can provide services for them.

Waisting more of our time while connected

As a final note, during the trip I was once again reminded of the fact that Google couldn’t make social applications if its life depended on it (and pretty soon it does). Mr. Scobleizer wrote a great post on the topic of how the best applications are the ones that enable us to waste our time more efficiently. That’s exactly the kinds of mobile apps that you need while travelling in a foreign country.

Google Places turned out to be in practice almost useless, while Foursquare actually provided quite satisfactory results most of the time. Particularly the new Explore tab in their mobile application provided a convenient stream of relevant information to a visitor in a foreign country. If only the Macedonian people would have submitted their comments in English, since the local cyrillic alphabet makes it impossible to even make guesses about what the text might mean…

If you’re not living in one of the world’s major airline hub cities, the reality is that the availability of flight connections will have an effect on where and how you choose to travel. While there’s no direct connection from Helsinki to any of the Scottish cities, luckily Ryanair offers low cost flights from Tampere to Edinburgh. Now, if you’ve been to Tampere-Pirkkala airport, you’ll know it’s not exactly the kind of buzzing international hub that makes you feel like a true jet-setter, rather it’s like being inside a small town bus station when boarding a Ryanair plane through the old Terminal 2. Still, everything worked just fine, the tickets were cheap and, quite surprisingly, our 3 hour flight landed in Edinburgh 1 hour ahead of schedule! Comparing that to the usual HEL-LHR flight times with Finnair and BA, it really made me pay attention to Ryanair’s tagline: “the on-time airline”.

Edinburgh was our first destination, but we didn’t plan on staying there for more than 2 days. The Scottish countryside felt like a more attractive environment to explore, plus Edinburgh is not a very inexpensive city to stay in. The Fringe festival kept the city center pretty much packed during day and night, offering a nonstop flow of entertainment around every corner. Since we hadn’t made any plans for attending specific events, we mainly focused on touring sights like the Royal Yacht Britannia and the Museum of Scotland, occasionally stopping for a moment to enjoy street artists from all around the world giving their performances to an equally international crowd.

To get to our next destination, we hopped into a rental car. I did have a bit of practice on driving on the “wrong” side of the road when visiting Ireland in June, but getting used to shifting gears with your left hand just ain’t easy to learn. Otherwise driving around Scotland was quite pleasant, as long as you manage your way through the ever so frequent roundabouts. Following the advise of a GPS navigator offers the joy of surprises when you discover yourself driving on winding single-track roads for 20 kilometers. Narrow roads on steep hills were something that we had to get used to when heading up north towards the Highlands.

We stayed in 6 different places during our 7 nights in Scotland, so there was quite a bit of driving and check-in/out procedures to complete along the way. First we visited Dufftown in the Speyside area, famous for it’s whisky distilleries. Then we drove through Inverness to Tain, and still a bit further up north to Dornoch. Next we started coming down south along Loch Ness and stopped at Invergarry. We continued south to Fort William at the end of the Great Glen Fault and stayed in Newtonmore, before returning back to Edinburgh through Stirling.

After touring hundreds of miles, I have to say Scotland is a beautiful country indeed. The wilderness gives you the perfect opportunity to calm down and just spend time spotting the countless sheep who inhabit the green fields all around you. The scenery bears resemblance to what I would expect to find in northern Scandinavia, so it’s no wonder the vikings felt right at home when they took charge of the Highlands some 1200 years ago.

Ah, whisky, the water of life. The most important export of Scotland and for a good reason. There’s no finer form of alcohol than a single malt Scottish whisky and no better place to explore whisky distilleries than Scotland. In Speyside there’s practically a distillery round every corner. We visited first the very modern facility of The Glenlivet and then Glenfiddich, which is probably the biggest distillery attraction in Scotland. The process of whisky production was thoroughly explained on both tours, which made you all the more anxious for getting a taste of the end product. The sensation of stepping into a warehouse filled with thousands of oak casks full of aging single malts is something your really need to experience with your own nose. I’ve been gradually developing my taste buds to appreciate the finer side of whiskies and I’m sure this little educational trip worked wonders on that front. Looking at my liquor cabinet back home, I have to say things are quite well when the 12 year old Chivas Regal is the worst bottle whisky in your possession.

Did I mention it rains a lot in Scotland? You bet it does. During our 7 day trip, there was one single day when no drops fell from the sky, but other than that it was more a case of “when will it rain” rather than “will it rain today”. Oh well, that was pretty much how I expected it to be. After the record high temperatures in Finland this summer, the Scotland visit was a nice little change of climate, which also reminded us of how great the summer weather had truly been. Normally you always travel from Finland to a warmer place, so when returning home it was bizarre to experience the sunshine and “heat wave” when stepping out of the plane.

As always, the full picture set can be found from my Picasa albums. Have a look, get your kilt on and then go explore Scotland yourself!

There are other definitions to “hot”, which is something I learned during my trip to the United Arab Emirates. July is not among the most favourite months for tourists to visit the area and I don’t blame them. We landed in Dubai on a Sunday morning and tried our best to perform a tour of the city’s main sights before spending the next few days in the office. With the weather forecasts setting the temperature at +45C every day (there weren’t too many live thermometers visible in Dubai), the tour ended up consisting of short hops outside of the air conditioned malls, shops and busses. The summer weather in Dubai can be best described as walking into a hot sauna with your clothes on to check if it’s ready for bathing, with the difference being that you can’t step outside after your done. Anyway, I managed to grab a set of photos where the lens is not all steamed up, so here you go:

My next stop will surely provide a much cooler experience, as we’re going to spend a week in Scotland, driving around the Highlands area. Better remember to pack my umbrella and rain coat, I suppose.

I could have flown home earlier, but I had previously reserved a ticket to Microsoft Convergence 2010 conference in Atlanta, US (you can read more about it in my CRM blog, part1 and part2) that was scheduled to start on April 24th. Since it began to look obvious quite soon that the flights in Europe would be affected for several days, I decided to re-route myself directly from Malaysia to US, without visiting home base. So, as a result, I performed my first ever around the world trip in quite a spontaneous manner.

Me and my colleague were of course lucky to be stuck in such a nice location as Kuala Lumpur. Furthermore, we were able to easily extend our stay in the same Sunway Pyramid Tower Hotel, thus removing the need to spend our time searching for alternative accommodation. On the night of our planned return date, Friday 16th, Malaysia Airlines still insisted on the web at 20:00 that their 23:55 flight to Amsterdam would depart as scheduled. Having viewed all the news online and putting 2 + 2 together, we decided to keep our heads cool and our luggage unpacked, since going to KL International Airport would have not served any purpose. At midnight the flight was cancelled and the world slowly started to come into terms with the true level of impact to the European air traffic from the looming volcanic ash high up in the clouds.

Even though Malaysia Airlines only has a few flights to Europe, their customer service phone number was totally unreachable on the next morning. Therefore we decided to take a taxi from Petaling Jaya to the MAS office in KL Sentral and visit a physical service desk, where we were given new tickets for the same flight on Sunday. Still, we didn’t really get our hopes high, because it was quite clear that in a situation such as this no one could truly know what was going to happen, not the airlines nor the passengers. It was a true force majeure if I’ve ever seen one.

If the same event had occurred in 1995, I have no doubt that we would have been royally screwed, totally at the mercy of travel agency service representatives acting based on the official but false information given to them by someone higher up in the chain. Luckily we lived in the year 2010 and in a world full of online information sources and social media channels. I quickly became virtual best friends with @eurocontrol, the Twitter account of the European organisation for the safety of air navigation. They provided real time links to press conference events and materials through their tweets, thus giving the most cutting edge information available to any media, as Eurocontrol effectively made the decisions who could fly and where.

What I was doing for the four extra days while being stuck in KL was effectively running a virtual situation room on my laptop screen, collecting pieces of information like airport departure/arrival data, news bulletins from officials, weather forecasts, interviews etc. in order to formulate a best guess scenario of what was going to happen within the next hours and days. It was a true case of the wisdom of crowds in action, similar to the phenomenon we’ve seen during many of the natural disasters in the 21st century, where the best and most reliable information does not come from any single media giant but rather from leveraging all the small content streams out there. When it came to extending our hotel room reservations, at one point I realized that I didn’t really need to necessarily even have a room for me and my stuff for the day, but what I could not survive without was a reliable internet connection. Although €14 per 24h was a steep connection rate compared to the €80 per night for a four star hotel room, it was a price I was more than happy to pay (and charge to my employer later on of course).

On Sunday afternoon it had become quite clear that if I wanted to make it to the US in six days, flying through Europe was out of the question. I started to look for alternative connections which would take me there through the other side of the globe. I found a route that would fly me from KL to Atlanta through Tokyo in 32 hours and decided that it was the best deal I was going to find in the current situation. Thanks to the magical power of the internet, booking the flights, hotels and rental cars on the fly was not too difficult. Figuring out exactly what kind of data the US immigration officials wanted to have of my trip in how many systems and by what date was actually a much bigger task. Not surprisingly, our corporate travel agency Kaleva Travel was swamped with 1000 times more service requests than usual. Combining that with the fact that it was the weekend, self service was the only way to go. At the end, the only thing I really needed the agency for was to push the button on writing the final ticket for my US-FIN return flight reservation, as I didn’t want to board the plane without a printed return ticket. Printing documents (such as boarding passes) while on the road – yeah, that’s another one of those small but pesky hurdles of travel, still in the year 2010.

On Tuesday night at 22:00 I started my journey from KLIA to Narita airport in Tokyo, where I landed 07:00 local time. It was a whopping 8 hours stop before the next departure, which would have given me plenty of time to visit downtown Tokyo. However, I was wearing just a short sleeve shirt and the weather outside was +12C and raining, so I decided to stay at Narita and instead took a day room for a couple of hours to catch some sleep. Besides, I had done a one day tour around Tokyo last year, so “been there, done that” I thought. Boarding the Delta jumbo at 15:00 in Tokyo and stepping out of it at 15:00 in Atlanta on the same exact day was quite a strange feeling, but at that point I was already detached from all of the time zones in the world. I barely managed to climb into my rental Chevy HHR and navigate my way along Interstate 75 (a whopping 15 lanes at the biggest interchange!) to my final destination, Residence Inn in Kennesaw. From the moment of waking up in the hotel bed in Kuala Lumpur and falling asleep at the next one in Georgia, US, the 50+ hours in between definitely felt like one of the longest days in my whole life.

The stay around the Atlanta metropolitan area was a pleasant one. Not that I had much free time on my schedule, between moving from our Kennesaw office to downtown Atlanta for the conference and then back again. The weather was surprisingly cold and did not really fit well with my wardrobe geared for a stay in Malaysia. Even the rain in Atlanta was much harder than what they have in Southeast Asia, thanks to a tornado that passed through Georgia during the weekend I was staying there. I tried to avoid eating too many supersize meals, but I have to say the burgers they have on offer in the States make it a difficult task. Cruising around the suburb area in my Ford Mustang, grabbing a McMuffin to go and shopping at Walmart gave at least some taste of the local lifestyle. My return flight to Finland was through New York, and with 5 hours to spend at JFK, I decided to also make a very quick trip to Manhattan: train to Penn station, a walk around Madison Square Garden, burger meal on 9th Avenue, a couple of photos of the Empire State Building and then back to Helsinki to celebrate 1st of May. Finally!

All in all, I’m glad to have made the trip around the world, but I’m just hoping that next time I will have the chance to focus a bit more on enjoying the trip itself and not so much on the arrangements of it.

Malaysia

We stayed in Kuala Lumpur for 4 nights. While the days were spent at our office in TPM (Technology Park Malaysia), there was still plenty of time to walk around the city center. Navigating in KL is quite easy, thanks to the ever visible Petronas towers, which allow you to quickly recalibrate your internal compass after stepping out from the huge maze of shopping malls. During our stay there was an earthquake on the region, which caused some serious damage in Indonesia, but we did not notice it until watching the news next morning.

After the work week we flew to the Penang Island, which is located some 300 kilometers north from KL. We stayed at the center of George Town, a UNESCO world heritage site. As you can imagine, the views were quite different compared to the modern skyscraper filled landscape of KL. Personally I preferred the green areas found from Penang Hill, which can be reached with a 30 minute funicular ride up the mountain.

Japan

On the following week we were scheduled to start our work at the Osaka ATC office on monday morning. This meant we had to wake up at 4 AM on sunday and start our long journey from Penang to KL to Shanghai and finally Osaka KIX airport. Miraculously our luggage had also followed us all this way.

During our stay in Japan, it was time for another natural disaster: Typhoon Melor. When we were packing our things and boarding a Shinkansen in Osaka, while heading towards our office in Tokyo, the wind had already picked up quite a lot in Osaka. On the next morning the typhoon had already moved past Tokyo, but the local transit was in a chaos, causing the ever so punctual Japanese railway system to suffer from unusual delays.

On friday at noon we were done with the working tasks of the week, so we powered off our laptops and took a Shinkansen to the city of Kyoto. Compared to Osaka or Tokyo, this is a place where it is quite easy to explore the historical roots of the Japanese culture, as there are temples and gardens at almost every street corner.

There are of course also other kinds of cultural offerings in this city of 1.5 million inhabitants. For example, the staged samurai fights at the Toei Kyoto Studio Park:

Here’s another shot from the highly modern Kyoto Station and it’s amazing escalators going right to the top of the world:

Even though it’s always fun to travel around and see the world, after 15 days, 8 flights and 5 hotel rooms, it felt good to be back home in Helsinki. When you have a chance to get out every once in a while, it’s much easier to deal with the all darkness,  slush and influenza that come with the traditional autumn in Finland.

• I spent 36 days travelling, 145 days home
• I travelled 30,733 km, which is 8% of the distance to the moon
• My average velocity (over the 6 months) was 7.11 km/h
• My carbon totalled at 3,574 kg, which is almost the annual CO2 produced by a Hummer H3 truck

It’s lucky I don’t own a Hummer (or any car), since by this rate I’d be driving 3 SUV’s per year carbon wise.