When you are running a small business, particularly if you are the only employee, a trip abroad poses a choice. Do you cut yourself off and hope nothing important turns up while you are away, or do you stump up to stay in touch?
Fortunately for business continuity, keeping track of electronic communications while abroad is becoming increasingly easy and cheap. If you simply want to check email and send quick replies while abroad, you might not need to take your own computer, as pay-as-you-use web connections have become common in many parts of the world. Many airports have such facilities. Travellers in US cities will find connections at office services chains such as Kinko's. And in Australia, web connections are increasingly seen as part of the tourism infrastructure. Melbourne's brand-new Federation Square tourist information centre, for instance, includes a good-value web cafe. For those who don't mind mixing with the young and footloose, backpacker hostels all over the world offer web access services, even if you are just paying to use the office computer for a few minutes.
If you use a webmail service already, such as Hotmail, you will use it as normal. If you normally receive your email through your internet service provider (ISP), check whether it offers a way to access your inbox via the web. If it doesn't, or if it does but is slow or unreliable, try www.mail2web.com. This free site retrieves email from almost any ISP and allows you to reply using your usual address. It works fast and reliably in several countries - useful when you are paying by the minute. You can use it as and when you need to or you can set up a personalised home page, meaning you just have to enter your password when on the road. Bear in mind that the latter makes your password more important than usual, and you should be careful with its security.
If you do feel the need to take a computer abroad, and you have collected all the power adaptors and phone plugs required, you still need local ISPs. GRIC (www.gric.com) has a global network of ISPs providing such services. An expensive but convenient alternative is to connect to your normal ISP in the UK. However, some UK ISPs, including Freeserve, bar connection when caller-line identification is not available. This includes many foreign calls, so check with your ISP first.
With your mobile, the first question is whether will it work. Standard dual-band phones will be fine in most of Europe, Asia and Australasia, but networks in the Americas generally require tri-band handsets. Japan's networks are incompatible with phones from the UK. If you take the mobile, you normally need to call your network to register for international calls. But when you do, check the call charges, bearing in mind that you will pay for accepting calls as well as making them. International rates vary enormously, both in size and structure. Orange, O2 and Virgin Mobile have simple rates for each country to and from the UK, whereas Vodafone and T-Mobile alter their rates depending on the time of day and which local network you use. It is usually cheaper to call a number in the same country, although Orange charges the same as for calls to UK.
To show the range of prices, accepting a call in the US costs 39p a minute with O2, but from £1.22 to £1.28 with Vodafone, although that can be pushed down to 71p if you pay an extra £2.50 a month. Calling the UK with Vodafone is less than the standard rate to receive - 86p to 99p.
Beware the answering service; Orange, T-Mobile and Virgin Mobile can charge you three times over for its use when abroad, as you pay for an inbound and outbound call while the message is being taken, then an outbound call to retrieve the message. You can avoid this by disabling the service before going abroad, or leaving your mobile phone behind and calling a UK number to check messages. Both services need to be set up with your network before departure. Vodafone and O2 users can arrange to receive text messages alerting them to messages, then only pay for a call to the UK. Even if you turn off the answering service, the mobile can still be used for text messaging, which remains good value. It doesn't cost any more for those sending you messages and you rarely pay to receive them. You will usually pay more to send messages; one sent through Australia's Telstra network takes Orange's cost per message from 10p to 30p, for example. But that's competitive compared with calling.
If going abroad for a while, minimising your mobile contract's free minutes often makes sense, as these often don't count towards calls made abroad. On longer or repeated stays, buying a local handset or SIM card can work out cheaper, although you then have to give people a new number to try. It is often cheaper to use landlines for making calls, and using a pre-pay UK network with freephone access numbers in the countries you are visiting makes it convenient. Alpha Telecom (www.alphatelecom.com) offers access numbers in 60 countries, OneTel (www.one-tel.co.uk) in 40, while Swiftcall (www.swiftcall.co.uk) covers 28. Some of these services charge a rate per minute for using the local access number, meaning you will pay something even if you don't get through.
However, the prices can be excellent value. Alpha Telecom charges 14p a minute for calls made through its freephone US number to UK landlines. BT's Chargecard service, which is charged to a BT bill, is available from 120 countries but starts at 89p a minute from Ireland - perhaps for emergencies only. If email, voicemail and text messaging seem a bit basic for your customers, but you can't afford a full-time secretary, several of the mobile phone networks offer pay-as-you-use answering services. With these, an operator takes your calls and then forwards messages through another medium.
See various mobile networks' international pricing at:
www.virginmobile.com/mobile/services/abroad/abroad.jsp
www.t-mobile.co.uk/Dispatcher?menuid=roaming_l_c
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How to keep the costs down
· You probably don't need to take your own computer just to check email - pay-as-you-go web connections are increasingly easy to find.
· Let your network know you are going abroad, and be sure to check their prices. It will cost to receive calls abroad - in some cases, more than the cost of actually making calls - and the pricing is often complicated.
· Leaving the answerphone switched on can be ruinously expensive, but text messaging is a bargain.
· Services that provide you with free dial-in numbers from the countries you plan to visit can be both convenient and good value - although
