Catshanghai

Image supplied by nubui on Flickr

I’m a big fan of Leo Laporte who single handedly created the Twit technology podcast network. His shows keeps me informed and stop me going insane during long commutes home through Shanghai rush hours.

Leo is coming to China at the end of this week to participate in a Geek Cruise where he’ll be giving talks about Iphone apps, social media and setting up a Mac Mini home theatre system. During this week’s episode of MacBreak Weekly Leo and his fellow geek cruisers alluded to the expense of setting up roaming cellphone data plans so they could tweet and blog on the road in China. Apparently, AT&T charge $199 a month for an international plan whereas UK’s O2 want travellers to pay 50 GBP for 50 mb of data.

I have good news for the geek cruising MacBreak Weekly panel whose twitter handles are respectively @leolaporte , @donmcallister and @ihnatko. Cancel your expensive data plans and do the following:

• Unlock your cellphone, which may not be possible yet if you are bringing the latest Iphone 3GS to China with you
• Fly to China
• Buy a China Mobile simcard (100 RMB) and another 100 RMB prepay voucher
• Change the sim card
• Call 10086 to setup a data plan and get instructions on configuring your phone, but the basic gprs settings are ap:cmnet, username:cmnet, password: cmnet.
  Use opendns (208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220) as your name server, because the Chinese DNS servers are awful.

100 RMB will pay for 2gb of data. 200 RMB will get you 5gb. It is Edge speed, which is quick enough to upload text and photos to blogs. GPRS will give you access even in remote areas, but it is very, very slow. Wifi is quicker and pervasive in coffee shops, hotels and restaurants. Wifi is often free, or you may be able to pay to use it from your Skype account if you are at Starbucks. Don’t expect to access Youtube unless you have access to a proxy, and even then it can be very slow. Twitter, Gmail, Flickr have all been blocked recently although they are working at the moment. Even unblocked international sites are slowed by lag and having to pass through the GFW.

Otherwise, Leo and his mates should enjoy their time in China by eating good food, checking out the historical sites and watching people play Mah Jong and walk backwards in parks.