I read the recent "internet connection and exercise" topic with great interest, but really need help.

We will be in Florence for all of February. I must use my laptop on a daily basis, as I will be working from 5-10pm daily on it. It is not convenient for me to work at an internet cafe. The apt does have full access telephone, but the cost for AOL is $6/hr and Earthlink is $9/hr.

I have been looking for local ISP service for this time instead. One wrote that it would be $75 + Vat plus telephone charges. Can anyone fill me in on the "telephone charges" part?

Kaitlyn

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kim,

Well Florence has no shortage of ISP's, and most of these have their rate information online. Since the Italian, so to speak, for "ISP" is the English "provider", it makes searches easy: start maybe with something like this search on Google; among the first-returned links there, ABC's list of Italian ISP's includes at least 4 in Florence, 2 in Prato, 1 in Empoli. (ABC's site as a whole, by the way, is well worth bookmarking.)

Like everywhere else, if you are modem-connected you will pay local phone charges, in tiny increments of a few seconds -- someone on this board will remember the Italian word for these.

There are few cable ISP's in Italy; it seems to me, but I don't keep up with this stuff that well, that last spring was the introduction of the very first one -- as it turns out, in Siena; Tuscany-Milan-Rome are of course the most likely places for cable providers. Your stay is probably not long enough to warrant having cable installed, but you might check and just conceivably get a pleasant surprise.

My Umbrian experience: in 1994 I was direct-connecting to my clients rather than to the Net, so didn't use a local ISP; in 1997 I used BCSNet in Foligno (expensive, poor service) and in 1998 I used Krenet in Perugia (still expensive, but better).

If you get a free provider like http://www.jumpy.it or http://www.interfree.it then you just have to pay for the amount of time online (scatti is the word that Bill was looking for, blocks of time). Will you be online for 5 hours a day or will you be able to work and then get online when you have things done?

Telecom Prices are as follows:

Connection fee (every call) 120 lire
Full price * first 15 minutes : 37 lire per minute
after the first 15 min. : 34 per minute
Reduced price ** first 15: 22 per minute
after first 15: 20 per minute

*Full price is Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. and Saturday from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m.
**Reduced price is all other times and national holidays.

So an hour at full price costs Lit. 2205 or around $1, reduced for 1 hour is Lit. 1350 or around $.60

If you want, I can help you set up an account and get you the software or just get you the configs.

LMK,
Cristina

Thank you so much. That is very helpful information. Sometimes I am able to log on and log off, if I am just handling emails, but other times I must log in to the server directly and therefore the connection remains constant.

Kaitlyn

Let us know how it all works out in Florence. I just pay the extra charge and go thru Earthlink - it used to be lower. But we only go online to send and receive email and do a little surfing, so it doesn't add up to much.