Low Bandwidth Travel – Part Deux

Some things work in PNG … and some things don’t. We have been having some telecommunications difficulties recently with our rinky-dink global go-anywhere SIM cards, and have also been seriously starved of internet access (well, internet access below $15 a day, and that actually works when you do pay the money). So, what to do?

Well, the answer is: (warning, Geek alert)

  • Buy a prepaid local SIM card from Digicel PNG (these are absolutely everywhere, perhaps surprisingly)
  • Set it up in my iPhone (so far, so good, and there are instructions for this)
  • Subscribe to a prepaid data service
  • “Fudge” (from first principles / guesswork / a little white hat inspiration) the Digicel internet tethering APNs to allow the iPhone to act as a data access point
  • Physically wire it to my laptop (I don’t have an iPhone 4, so I can’t do this wirelessly)
  • Use Connectify on the laptop to set up a wifi hotspot to help out any other tourists in need (and possibly recoup some of my initial SIM card investment…)

And there you go. 100MB of data? 20 Kina (about $10). The feeling of smug satisfaction for having worked out something like this while out in the bush? Priceless!

Caption: Checking the blog comments, while bird of paradise spotting at the Kumul Lodge in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea.

One thought on “Low Bandwidth Travel – Part Deux

  1. You need to get out more. Try travelling around the world, or something. Geek.

    (PS seething envy that you have this problem to solve, and also the skills to solve it)

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