How to Break Through the Barrier of the Foreign Telephone

Say you find yourself in Minsk, where you’ve gone to seek new markets for your employer, Greengrass Grommet Co. You’ve got your laptop, and you’re ready for some serious trans-global faxing and e-mail.

But you find that Minsk is a strange mixture of the familiar and the exotic. Perhaps the only phones in your hotel are of the digital PBX variety, which have been known to fry some modems with their higher current. Maybe the phone jacks have holes for five giant prongs. And now that your battery is running low, you discover that the electrical outlets can’t accommodate your laptop’s American-style plug.

Even if you could surmount all these obstacles, is it really possible to dial America Online from Minsk without spending a fortune in toll charges? Traveling on business is tough enough without having to jump through technological hoops in order to stay wired. Fortunately, great distances, unfamiliar phone jacks and other such problems need not result in the death of any salesman. In fact, the kind of difficulties you’re having in Minsk might have been avoided with a little foresight and a few dollars.

If you’re planning to take a laptop on a trip, the easiest part of your preparations is downloading local access numbers for wherever you happen to be going. Why pay long-distance charges when the major online services allow log-in via local calls in cities all around the world?

CompuServe has local dial-in numbers virtually everywhere and is the online service of choice if you do a lot of traveling. Not only can you dial in from all over the world, usually without additional charges, but you can use CompuServe to telnet to an Internet account in the United States. Thus, last year I dialed CompuServe in Amsterdam and Berlin, used it to reach my Internet provider in Los Angeles and avoided long-distance charges.

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America Online, more of a consumer service, nevertheless has put together a growing international network reaching from Perth, Australia, to Tashkent (the capital of Uzbekistan) and, yes, even including Minsk (the capital of Belarus). But beware: AOL levies a $6-per-hour surcharge for using local numbers in these foreign cities, so you’ll want to keep your sessions short. Use FlashSessions to jump on, send outgoing mail, get new mail and jump off.

I couldn’t find any international access numbers for Prodigy, and a spokesman confirmed that Prodigy simply doesn’t have any. But Prodigy and the two other big online services do have local dial-ups all over the United States, as does the Microsoft Network and Netcom, the biggest Internet service provider. And increasingly, first-class hotels in this country have phones with data ports that make computer connections a snap.

But you can’t dial any number with your computer if you can’t connect your modem to the local phone system. In that case, what you’ll need is an adapter, which is where a kinetic Englishman named Gordon Brown comes in. His company, TeleAdapt Inc., prides itself on selling an array of devices that allow connections between your personal computer and virtually any phone system on the planet.

“Few users anticipate or are prepared for the problems of connecting laptops to a foreign telephone system,� says Brown, whose catalog shows five adapters for Germany alone.

Brown started TeleAdapt three years ago in the bedroom of a London flat. Global commerce and laptop sales have boomed seemingly in tandem, and the company today has 50 employees and offices in Campbell near San Jose and in Sydney, Australia, and London.

International connectivity is all they do. For modular phone systems, TeleAdapt carries 39 adapters for connecting your familiar American RJ-11 phone plug to a jack in any of more than 200 countries. If you’re going somewhere without modular phones, they’ll sell you a set of alligator clips and a little device that glows green when you’ve got the connection right, also warning of harmful voltage on digital PBX phone systems that aren’t compatible with standard modems.

If those PBX systems are really a problem, TeleAdapt will sell you a little switch box that eliminates the incompatibilities. They also sell filters for dealing with the high-frequency signals used in certain European countries to meter phone usage. You can buy anything from a single $30 adapter to their $950 “Ultimate Connection� package, which is no doubt equipped to handle phone systems on Mars. And of course, they sell power adapters as well.

Brown says TeleAdapt customers are mostly business types, but they also include a marine attorney who follows ship sinkings and bought the Ultimate Connection, and a British journalist working for a New Zealand broadcaster who, thanks to the right adapter, was able to connect using the only phone on a tiny island off the coast of Chile.

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TeleAdapt customers faced with a thorny connection problem can call the company for technical support, and for truly desperate situations, they’ll even sell you a fast v.34 acoustic coupler into which you can simply strap some alien handset in order to get your data moving.

I remember when these acoustic couplers were standard equipment for filing stories from remote news bureaus, and I’m not that old. Of course, I also remember pounding out my copy on something called a “manual typewriter.� For the uninitiated, this involves a stone tablet, a sharp chisel and--oh, never mind. You can see one in the next Flintstones movie.

Daniel Akst can be reached via e-mail at Dan.A[email protected]. His World Wide Web page is at https://www.well.com/~akst.

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Road Warriors

TeleAdapt Inc., the company that sells all the adapters, can be reached at [email protected] or by voice at (408) 370-5105. Their World Wide Web page, at https://www.teleadapt.com/, is a good resource as well. For local access phone numbers, the America Online keyword is ACCESS. On CompuServe, go ACCESS. On Prodigy, jump PHONE.