I’ve been looking for a good answer to connectivity while travelling for quite a while. Most of the time, I find myself paying $10/day for high-speed connectivity at my hotel and at T-Mobile hotspots — it’s great, but it’s not available everywhere. And I haven’t quite talked myself into signing up for the $30/month T-Mobile plan because I do want to be able to use wireless at places other than airports and Starbucks (I can’t afford to drink that much coffee!).

So when AT&T Wireless announced their UMTS service last week, I was very interested. 300kb down, 50kb up — not bad. And IBM is willing to pay for the equipment and service, so I gave it a shot.

I got the Novatel Merlin U520 UMTS modem, since I was looking for a strictly-data service. I took it home, installed the software, and was on the air in minutes. And it worked at the advertised speed. It even worked in my office. I was happy (though the software is somewhat goofy!).

Last night, I decided to try an experiment — I set up my laptop on the passenger seat and had it connect to the service as I drove. I intended to start an audio stream and look for dropouts.

But I didn’t get that far. The modem showed “no signal” in the parking lot. That didn’t bother me, because my phone often shows “no signal” there. But I expected the modem to connect as soon as I got into the flats.

It didn’t. I didn’t keep a constant eye on the modem, but I glanced at it from time to time, and the first time I saw connectivity was only a mile or two from my house.

This morning, I used the modem at home, and again, I was happy — especially when we had a brief power outage, and my connection stayed up even though the house router went down (hmmm, maybe I should get a UPS!).

Then I drove to IBM’s Silicon Valley Lab for a meeting. My cellphone had full signal, but the modem showed no signal. So I came up on the building wireless LAN and did some investigation. It turns out that the Merlin U520 is UMTS-only; it doesn’t fall back to GPRS/EDGE, and so it’s useless in a non-UMTS area, which is most of the country. And so it won’t solve my problem of needing connectivity while travelling.

AT&T Wireless offers two UMTS data-capable cellphones which do claim to fall back to EDGE/GPRS data rates. They’re awfully large, but it’s probably worth trying one as an experiment on an upcoming trip. Otherwise, it’s back to Starbucks.

This morning, I overslept a bit (so I guess I’m mostly over any residual jet lag, though I haven’t suffered from it very much on any trip since I started following the melatonin regimen Jane Brody wrote about in the New York Times), but still got downstairs in time to go out to breakfast at 7am, enjoying the glorious early spring weather (the rain vanished overnight).

Our plan was to go back to Jonathan’s for breakfast — they have a set breakfast including broiled salmon and rice for about (¥600), which is a pretty good deal, especially when compared to the ¥2800 breakfast buffet at the hotel. But when we approached the shop, there was a sign on the door (in Japanese, of course) — all I could read on it was numbers: “03/31/2004” and “00:00-09:00”. I had a bad feeling about the sign, but the door was open, so we went in. And quickly discovered that my bad feeling was right, because all of the chairs and tables were stacked at the edges of the room; I guess they were doing periodic maintenance.

So we headed onward. We tried a couple of coffee shops, but couldn’t communicate well enough to figure out whether they’d have anything I’d eat. Finally, we decided to check out the nearby Starbucks, where I was pleasantly surprised to see that they had balsamic chicken sandwiches available. So that’s what I had for breakfast — coffee and chicken at Starbucks. And then a scone for dessert. And then some delicious fruit from the am-pm market on the ground floor of the IBM Hakozaki building. Total expense, about ¥1000, and it was healthier than what I would have had at the hotel (well, maybe the scone wasn’t the healthiest choice I could have made, but I did pick the blueberry scone instead of the chocolate chunk variety).

Now I’m in the meeting room for the rest of the day (unless there’s enough time for an escape during lunch or breaks). Oh, well…that is why I’m here, after all.