Diane's Business Games Blog

Accessing games requires access to the Internet, so I was keen to observe how easy access would be when I went on my five-week trip last month from Australia to Kuala Lumpur Airport to Cambodia to the United Kingdom to Paris, France to the United Kingdom and back to Australia.

I went on the trip with my husband, Neil, who took his work computer. The computer was set up for cable and Wifi access to the Internet. This worked well on the way over at Kuala Lumpur airport, where they have free Wifi access, and in a little Internet coffee shop in Coventry, but not at any other place. Perhaps it was something to do with the Internet network security restrictions on his computer. Unfortunately, this limited our Internet access to mostly Internet cafes, public terminals, and libraries in Cambodia, France, and the United Kingdom.

In Cambodia I thought I would have limited or no Internet access. However, in Siem Reap, one of Cambodia’s larger cities, at the modest hotel where we stayed they had a room of computers with free access to the Internet. Admittedly the service did go down for a while one day–apparently, a common occurrence after heavy rain.

In Paris we had free access to the Internet, because Neil was a registered participant at a conference at the Palais Congres. However, I found it difficult using the French keyboard, which has some of the alphabet (and other) keys in different places. I couldn’t touch type; instead I had to look at the keys, and even then I kept pressing the wrong keys.

In the United Kingdom we couldn’t take advantage of the free Wifi setups in places, such as Heathrow Airport or service centres on the major roads. We paid for access at Internet cafes or targeted libraries in the small towns we visited, such as Reading, Oxford, Coventry, Birmingham, and other places. The libraries were (mostly) free, but the downside was that competition for terminals was high and time limited to between 1/4 and 2 hours. Mostly access was fine, except at Reading, which had a block on Internet providers. This meant that I could not access my web-based mail through my Web provider’s website. And in York I could not open Word attachments. (I couldn’t do this in Paris either, as they weren’t using Microsoft software.)

Access to the Internet is becoming easier; however, as a traveller, I found access to the Internet can become problematic, when trying to deal with unfamiliar environments with differing rules.

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