I may be travelling to Paris for an extended period of time (at least several months) in the near future and am wondering how hard it would be to use my personal laptop and some sort of dialup account to get online (I will have a company laptop that I can plug into a decent LAN at work, but I'd rather not install Quicken, pay bills, etc. on a machine that I don't own). Hopefully I will be staying in a hotel until I can find a furnished apartment to rent.

Is my best bet an American ISP with a modem pool in Paris (if there even is one) or a French ISP? Does anyone know how expensive dialup access gets in France (I'm really wondering what the cost of the local phone calls is)?

-Joe

For extended periods of time away from home, your best bet is a local ISP. Perhaps (and I shudder to say this) AOL?

If you don't want to go that route, you can see if your ISP offers some sort of roaming support. Lots of ISP's use a company called iPass (www.ipass.com) to do Global Roaming for dial-up.

and don't forget to use an international modem. Most countries have different protocol etc. I recommend the one I use;

Xircom 56k Global Access - http://www.xircom.com

Great little modem. Had mine for over three years now and it's never skipped a beat in any country I've used it in

Greg Moore