Running costs

We’re constantly told that the biggest rip-off in the computer industry is the inkjet cartridge, but I think mobile data charges run a very close second. Connecting to your office or the internet while on the road is increasingly important for business users – indeed a principal rationale for this very column – but, despite huge demand and uptake, the economies of scale never seem to materialise. Whether you’re consuming Wi-Fi over a latte in the coffee shop or checking your emails on your smartphone via GPRS, you’re probably paying a scandalous price, especially if you’re buying mobile data access on an ad hoc basis.

Pop into your local Starbucks and do a wireless scan, and you’ll probably find a T-Mobile hotspot lurking behind the counter. Check the price list, though, and you’ll see the data is almost as expensive as the coffee – signing up for one hour will set you back a fiver. That may turn you cold on the hot-spot and persuade you to try connecting via your phone or mobile data card: GPRS is plenty fast enough for casual browsing and emails, and fast UMTS services (more commonly known as 3G) are now available in most urban locations. But, before you do, check those prices again. Most mobile operators charge you around £2 for each megabyte and, in these days of HTML mail with huge attachments and Flash-driven websites, eating a megabyte doesn’t take long.

Comparing the price of a typical cheap broadband landline with these Wi-Fi and GPRS costs will bring tears to your eyes. A low-cost ADSL service might have a 10GB usage cap and costs around £15 per month, which, if my maths is correct, amounts to 2p per hour, or 0.15p per megabyte. So, how come mobile networks can get away with charging £5 and £2 for almost the same product? No doubt they’ll tell you stories about infrastructure investment, neglecting the fact that broadband operators have infrastructure to pay for too. Cynics will suggest that costs are kept this high to pay for the astronomical bids the networks made for their 3G licences, but even that doesn’t really hold water. Mobile data was already this expensive (possibly dearer) long before that 3G auction.

So, what do you do if you need data on the move? One good way to bring down costs is to buy your access as part of a bundle deal – Wi-Fi is considerably cheaper if you buy it by the month rather than the hour, while GPRS/3G prices tumble if you tack a few monthly megabytes onto your mobile contract. But where are the best deals? It’s a bit of a jungle out there, and finding the most cost-effective solution isn’t easy. I’ve recently been through this very exercise, so I can give you a few tips and helpful pointers.

Let’s start with Wi-Fi. First, don’t rely on free or “borrowed” Wi-Fi access. Parts of the country do have zero-cost hotspots available, sometimes through genuinely free providers such as Loose Connection and Pier to Pier here in Brighton. Sometimes slightly dodgy connections are possible via companies and individuals who leave their wireless routers “open”, either with deliberately altruistic intent or, more likely, because they didn’t read the security chapter of the manual. Either way, you can’t rely on this type of access – that one critical time when you really need a connection (to grab an important email or reboot a fallen server), there’ll be no free access point in sight. Been there, done it, got a drawer full of T-shirts…

No, the key to both reasonable Wi-Fi costs and availability is roaming. Of the three main hotspot operators in the UK – BT Openzone, T-Mobile and The Cloud – BT and T-Mobile sell only their own access, but The Cloud offers third-party access for several other providers, including BT Openzone but also the likes of O2, Vodafone, Boingo and RoamPoint. You’ll find The Cloud hotspots mainly in pubs and hotels. Some of these operators have agreements that allow customers of other networks to use their hotspots, which is great because it means you don’t have to sign up with all three. Unfortunately, though, not all operators have roaming agreements with each other – there’s no provision for T-Mobile customers to use The Cloud hotspots, or for O2 customers to use T-Mobile. Dig deeper into this messy matrix and you’ll find that one company has roaming arrangements covering all the major hotspot providers, and that’s BT Openzone. Since they can roam onto both T-Mobile and The Cloud, Openzone subscribers get a much better choice of network access places than users of the other networks.
So, having settled on BT Openzone, the next step is to find its most cost-effective tariff. There’s a range of pay-as-you-go and subscription options, but by far the best bargain is a special deal for existing BT Broadband customers – 500 minutes of Wi-Fi access per month for £5. Plus, those 500 minutes could be 100 individual five-minute sessions if you want, quite unlike buying an hour that you have to use all or waste it.

But what if you’re not a BT Broadband customer? In that case, you’re supposed to buy a package that costs £10 per month for 250 minutes, twice the price for half the minutes. But don’t worry, as just about anyone can get that 500 minutes for £5 deal, because the small print says it’s available to anyone who owns a BT networking product. Scour Ebay for the cheapest BT ADSL or wireless adapter – the last such item to sell as I write this was a Voyager 105 ADSL Modem for £1 plus £2 postage – and, when it arrives, call BT Openzone on 0800 169 1397 and tell it you want the £5-per-month deal. You’ll then be asked for the serial number of your BT networking equipment, although sometimes they don’t even bother. A fiver a month for access to all the Openzone, T-Mobile and The Cloud hotspots is a bargain.

Now your Wi-Fi is sorted out, what do you do about GPRS and/or 3G? That’s a matter of trudging through the offers and deals on the various operators’ websites. Compare their consumer and business tariffs, as there’s nothing to stop a business buying a consumer contract, and for light users it may well be more cost effective. (Remember that these prices will be inclusive of VAT on the consumer site, so you’ll need a little bit of maths when comparing headline prices.) I’ve been going through this process over the past few months for my own company’s mobile needs, and one thing that’s become quite clear is that the offers change at least monthly. Gone are the days of the standard tariff, so if you can’t find anything you like right now just wait a month or two.

Another thing I couldn’t help but notice is that – at least for the past three months – T-Mobile’s offers seem to have been substantially better than anyone else’s. At the time of writing, it’s offering a 25% discount for the life of the contract, which, coupled with its already good-value Flext 30 tariff, gives you 400 cross-network minutes and 100 texts for £19.15. You can add 2GB of data access via Web’n’Walk, taking the total to £23.95 per month (exc VAT). I think you’ll be hard-pressed to better that deal on any other network at the moment.

Having said all that, it isn’t the deal I went for. You see, my team uses BlackBerrys for email access on the move and, because we have our own BlackBerry Enterprise Server, we need to be on a special business tariff that includes the BlackBerry APN. Checking around the networks, I found that Orange doesn’t want to deal with small businesses such as mine; O2 charges £36 per BlackBerry per month on top of its normal mobile contracts; Vodafone charges £28 for up to 6MB email data per month; and T-Mobile wants just £10 extra for up to 50MB on its Business 1-plan tariff, with a further 25% off if you sign up for 18 months. No prizes for guessing which I went with. It’s hard to know whether T-Mobile will be able to sustain its current pricing and discounts but, if it does, the other networks are going to have to start some drastic slashing to compete. Right now, though, if you’re looking for a new mobile contract – especially one with a data element – the choice is something of a no-brainer.
Active stink

You’ll often read in the IT press (including this very magazine) that the PDA is dead. However, I disagree – the PDA isn’t dead, it just got a phone grafted onto it and became known as a smartphone. I’ve just done a group test of smartphones for another publication, and if you ignore their telephone element all these devices are just PDAs beneath the skin.

Many of the latest devices run the Windows Mobile 5 operating system and, although it’s a great smartphone platform, it does have an Achilles heel: Microsoft’s ActiveSync software. I wonder if there’s a single Windows Mobile user who hasn’t had to wrestle ActiveSync into submission at some time. It seems that every new release promises to fix previous problems but ends up creating a whole host of new ones. The tragicomic truth is that ActiveSync was first introduced back in 1999 as an attempt to overcome the problems associated with the earlier Windows CE Services but, with hindsight softened by the mists of time, I don’t remember CE Services ever being quite as problematic and unstable as ActiveSync has now become.

You’d have thought that since Microsoft is pouring such huge marketing and PR spends into Windows Mobile 5 (have you seen the amount of space it’s bought on London’s tube trains?), it might have also spent a few hundred thousand bucks on replacing ActiveSync with something more reliable. But no, instead all we get is yet another version (ActiveSync 4) with yet another series of problems. This is merely annoying for individual users, but for people trying to deploy Windows Mobile at enterprise level it’s costing a small fortune, and wasting hours of both support and end users’ precious time.

Do a quick Google, or have a hunt around some of the Microsoft support forums and newsgroups, and you’ll see that one of the most common problems is with Error 85010014. When you see this error, you’ll find you can move files between the PC and the handheld, and see directories, but problems will arise as soon as you try to establish a relationship between the handheld and Outlook.

I’ve seen this error a number of times now and have narrowed it down a bit. It seems to happen mostly when ActiveSync is installed on a machine where Outlook has been upgraded through one or more different versions, especially when the most recent upgrade has been up to Outlook 2003. Luckily, I’ve also discovered a procedure that seems to solve the problem and which, touch wood, has worked every time so far. This process assumes you already have ActiveSync 4.1 installed:

1 First, take a backup of any important Outlook data using File | Import and Export | Export to a file | Personal Folder File. If you’re using Outlook purely to connect to an Exchange Server and only using the online store, you can probably skip this step.

2 Then, completely remove Outlook from your machine. Don’t use the removal procedure on the Office disc but instead do it from Control Panel | Add Remove Programs, which seems to do a more thorough job.

3 Then, from your original Office disc, do a complete reinstall of Outlook.

4 Go to Settings | Control Panel | Mail and select Show Profiles, then delete your old profile and create a new one with a different name.

5 Start up Outlook and via File | Import and Export restore any data that you saved at step 1.

6 Start ActiveSync on the PC and select File | Delete Mobile Device. You’ll see a confirmation dialog – just hit OK.

7 Now connect your mobile device to your PC and follow the instructions to create a new device partnership. Problem hopefully solved.
A lot to lose

Following on from last month’s advice about hanging on to your laptop, there’s one important consequence of laptop theft that needs to be mentioned, and it’s a topic that isn’t often covered in the press. Of course, we all know how dangerous it can be if someone gets hold of all the documents on your laptop’s hard drive, where they might find financial details of your company, or even details of some secret new product – just imagine what your competitors might pay for information like that. If you work in public services or government, there’s an additional and important PR angle to consider too, as we’ve all seen those “top defence secrets found on Ebay laptop” stories in the press.

These can all be very damaging, but a further consequence of laptop loss that isn’t usually reported is identity theft. ID theft itself is big news – we’re all encouraged to shred our old bank statements and keep our PINs stored safely – but most identity theft coverage seems to concentrate on the personal angle. If you lose your laptop, though, identity theft can suddenly take on a whole new perspective, as it starts to affect your business as well as your personal life.

Once someone has your laptop, they can effectively become “you” in many important ways. More and more companies are moving to single-sign-on for all of their business systems and networks, and quite often this will involve using a web page for the initial authentication. Despite all advice to the contrary, I’d guess that a good 50% or more of users will have that single password saved in their web browser: there are ways to adapt those sign-on pages to prevent browsers from offering to save passwords, but not many companies seem to bother.

And what about access to crucial external systems? For security reasons, you’ll probably have been sent your username and password in separate emails, but that’s no security at all once someone has access to your complete email archive, as both emails will be neatly sitting side-by-side. But it’s outgoing email that’s the biggest danger. Once someone has your laptop and access to your email account, other people will be fairly certain that any messages they receive really are from you. The thief could email the payroll dept with “your” new bank account details for the monthly salary transfer, and they probably wouldn’t bat an eyelid. Frightening, isn’t it?

Of course, we can all go a long way toward avoiding these problems by properly password protecting our laptops, which is the kind of thing that ought to be enforced by your security policies. However, this month, on two separate occasions (once at a client’s site, the other time in a café), I’ve seen people who had their passwords written on a Post-it note stuck to their laptop. I wonder if these people would do the same with their credit card PIN?