This column comes to you from the Pickwick Hotel in San Francisco. I was expecting to stay with relatives this weekend, but the best-laid plans of mice, men and IT consultants have a habit of changing. Here I am, in the kind of hotel I enjoy – old, slightly tatty, but dripping with atmosphere. Even if I have cracked my head on the towel rail in the sub-miniature bathroom five times.
What’s not quite so atmospheric is how my 5G devices are working here. I’m used to the idea that I have to make a sizeable top-up to my PAYG account when roaming in some countries. The phone I use for apps, navigation and overseas messaging is on a different network to my main phone, because I’ve seen the problems with networks having favourites and anti-favourites when it comes to successful roaming connections. I don’t want apps or satnav to suck up the tiny data allocation I may or may not have been given, only to discover a huge bill on my return home.
More to the point, I do want my main phone to stay open no matter what. Flight updates, meeting invites – the risk that those messages might be kyboshed by over-enthusiastic data consumption from non-vital apps has made me into a two-phones traveller.
So, arriving in California, I picked up my
