The iPad Tour: In France, It’s nice (necessary) To have friends
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“Welcome to the most expensive service in the world!” my UK friend Andre (who helped me get my O2 service last week) had trumpeted to me in a text message as I arrived at my first hotel stop in Nice, France, late Monday night (gleefully happy to tweak the French— apparently the hundred years’ war not yet quite over!)
There was more than a grain of truth to all of this— as I found out, getting local service of any kind was not so easy in France.
My plan was to continue in France what had worked in the UK— get a local sim card, this time from Orange, and instead of paying $100 for 100 megabytes from AT&T, get a decent USA sized chunk of service for many less euros, and fill in the gaps with my $7.95/mo Boingo wifi service.
What I quickly found out was that Boingo didn’t seem to work anywhere in France (their maps claimed otherwise) and Orange had a strange policy where 3G data could be used for anything other than e-mail!
… And one other small detail… to get a micro-sim of any kind in France, one must have a French bank account! (Why, said Andre, “because they’re French!”)
A good friend, from my contracting days for Digital Equipment (parts of which now known as HP), no longer a software developer, but a beekeeper, lives locally here in France, and offered to use his local credentials to get me online.
A little research, and we ditched Orange for SFR, which offers a 1GB ‘unlimited’ account for 29€. A short wait in line at SFR, some contracts signed, a sim password, and a cash transfer later, I’m now data enabled until my return to the USA in about a week and a half.
Setup was simpler— instead of applying through the app, it was done in store, with a sim pin. There is a no-term contract, which my friend has to cancel after I leave.
At dinner tonight, a woman at the next table (UK based photographer) upon seeing my iPad got up and walked over to my table, and asked if she could look at her website— which had just been converted to support the iPad.
“You must be mad for this iPad… Is the network always this slow?”
Mad perhaps, but frankly, I was glad to have any network at all.
