As a a preamble to this, I'm not convinced that the current trend in computing towards the 'cloud' is entirely useful to the cruising yachtie. The main reason is that, by nature of our movement, the connection we may get to the internet is often poor or expensive or both. The connection we have is likely to be capped if from a mobile provider. Thus we cannot really migrate data or applications in daily use to the cloud as there is a good chance they will be unavailable or unaffordable when we actually need them.
A good example is email, I use the Thunderbird email client to trawl the several accounts I have for new mail which is transferred to my laptop. Thunderbird can make use of an otherwise iffy connection because the data transfer is smaller than the overhead of conecting with each email provider online, there are no ads or other extras adding to the data transferred. Thunderbird can also be configured to download a maximum of so much data, so if your mates send you all thier holiday snaps they stay on your email providers server until you choose to go get them (but you do know they are there as Thunderbird will have a partial message registered). Its a bit like getting text messages, they can pop up when you dont know a connection exists (provided everything is hooked up).
However, the internet is an invaluable resource for all sorts of things which I'm loathe to be without. So, we left the UK expecting primarily to gain internet access by buying a data SIM card in each country. To facilitate this, and make the connection shareable by all onboard, we had been given an Ericsson W25. This is an early form of MiFi device, in that you slip your SIM card into the device, configure it with PIN/APN etc and it connects to the mobile ISP whilst providing a wifi access point on board.
This has worked well in Spain, Portugal and Italy (MASMovil, Vodafone & WIND respectively) but failed in France (SFR) where the purchased service did not deliver. In Spain we had a data allowance of 5Gb/month which was marginal, we blew it occasionally - expensive; in Italy we have 10Gb which, for two people, gives a margin of comfort and allows both to indulge our interests and download an hour or so of TV each week.
I would also suggest that anyone with a capped mobile connection installs adblockers to their browser. A little experimenting showed that when using the YBW forums, ads added a 30% overhead to the data traffic - extrapolate that out and you lose a significant proportion of your data to stuff you dont want.
On those occasions where we had access to a wifi signal, in marinas mostly but once or twice at anchor in France, we have a USB WiFi booster with an external aerial that could be hauled up a flag halyard. Without some work this restricts the signal to one device so we had to take turns using it. We also subscribed to a VPN service for two main reasons; first, to increase the security of our data between each laptop and the internet; second, to appear to be in the UK mostly for broadcast material access. The VPN service is a single login so could only be used one at a time.
All this worked well for us through 2011 & 2012 but for 2013 I wanted to make some changes and be able to share more.
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