"Robm" wrote in message
. ..
Hello,

I will be traveling for about 5 weeks in Australia, one week in Sydney, a
few days in Adelaide, a roadtrip from there to Melborne, a week on
Mornington. I understand that internet cafes tend to be pricey and not
ubiquitous.

Wrong on both counts.

In addition, I need to be able to VPN into various computer networks in
Canada, something that's usually impossible from an internet cafe. Is it
possible to make a a short term deal with a dial-up isp with a country wide
(or at least SA, NSW and VIC) access number?

Yes, easy. You can buy dial-up internet access time at many places - Dick
Smith Electronics (a big electronics chain) springs to mind, but there are
many, many other places (see below). You can buy (say) $20 worth of access
and you have some months to use it. The actual service would be by one of
the big ISPs - bigpond and optus being the two biggest.

The real cost is humping a laptop around.

I was looking at ii and their iidialup2 lite package. Would that work?
They have a nation wide access number that works for residential customers
of Atlantis, Discovery, Explorer, Freedom and, you guessed it, iidialup2.
Are these providers common?

Never heard of them. Then again, I'm not inthe market, so this doesn't mean
anything.

would this work in a hotel?

Yes.

How about from a public phone booth, assuming that public phones have modem
plugins (not a good aasumption maybe)?

Public phone?

Pretty much everybody owns a mobile phone; I wasn't aware that public phone
booths still exist.


The other thing that comes up a lot on Google is dialer.net
(http://australia.dialer.net/rates.html). Anybody has any experience with
that concept? I can't find anything in Google Groups on that, makes you
think...


Doesn't look appropriate to me. You don't need WiFi access in 150 countries;
you want internet access in Australia - and it doesn't even say what the
coverage is in Australia. When you are sitting in your hotel in the
Mornington Peninsula, you want a Mt Martha access point, not a Minsk access
point.

http://www.bigpond.com/internet-plan...id/default.asp

(about the same price as an internet cafe - $1 an hour - but presumably will
allow VPN)

http://www.optus.com.au/portal/site/...extfmt=default

(better deal - about $0.50 per hour. Note the link to retailers who will
sell you the access
http://www7.optus.com.au/Vign/ViewMg...ew_226,FF.html.
If you key in postcode 2000 - which is the central business district of
Sydney - there are about a dozen retailers listed).

Any and all comments appreciated!


I reckon carrying around a lappie is a real pain the arse when you are
travelling. Unless you absolutely need VPN, I would simply visit interbet
cafes, which are (despite what you have been told) ubiquitous and cheap.
Where you are going, there won't be a problem. If you want to bring your own
laptop, just buy some prepaid hours from a retail outlet and top up as
neccessary.