Brainstorming French and Data Solution
 

I've got a problem and I was hoping you guys could help me on it.

We have a free place to stay for one week in the South of France (Baritz) with our best friends who are renting the place and really would like us to come there for one week. I willing to spend several hundred dollars to pull the issue off.

My wife, however, has two days that she can't move in the middle of it where she needs to remotely teach a webex session to clients in the Chicago. The condo in France does not have broadband and we are talking about sixteen hours of phone time to the States where a good connection is required.

I will pop for a French DID for my Asterisks server and hard forward it to the Webex call in center. I'm also playing with whether we can use the numbers for www.webex.fr to connect to a www.webex.com session. If there is a landline in the condo, I think I can pull this off. I'm concerned the answer, however, is no.

From what I recall about French prepaids, there is nothing that would be affordable to hold even local calls that last this long. Can anyone think of anything?

Even more importantly, I think I'm screwed on the internet end. I think serving powerpoints up for UMTs would work, but I can't think of anything where the data rates would work.

I'm willing to throw some money at the problem, but I'm not sure of how to handle it. Using 09 and a callback, I could make the call to the US for $135, but I question whether the call quality would be good enough. On French prepaids, I think the best rate I'm going to get per minute for a local call is going to be in the neighborhood of $0.30 a minute unless things have dropped.

On the data front, I'm even more at a loss. Using a Vodafone out of Germany I think I can get fifty megs a day, but I don't think this will work. We are going to run a practice session over a US UMTs connection. (I am disabling HSPA and HSDPA on the theory that it will more accurately mirror the French data experience).

I've considered renting a hotel room for the two days to get internet access, but this puts me down $3,50 out the door and then I have to deal with the phone issues. I am presuming that French hotels generally gouge for local calls.

Any thoughts?

Your best bet would be renting a room at a chain hotel such as Accor (there's an Ibis at the Biarritz airport, in Anglet).

French Accor hotels offer Orange WiFi at roughly EUR15/day and you have sufficient bandwidth to establish both a WebEx session and a VoIP connection to the regional dial-in DID.

was in biarritz a while ago, even then there were plenty of FON access points
everywhere - would this be an option with some luck? check the maps.

www.fon.com

greetings - heinz -