Accessing your account while traveling

Accessing your Internet account while traveling can be challenging: Long-distance charges can be high, and long distance telephone lines tend to be noisy. SWCP provides several login schemes and advice for making this less painful.

800 Number

We have an 800 number available for travelers to use. This is billed at $10/hour (about 17 cents/minute -- sometimes less expensive than regular long distance charges, but not always). Time connected to the 800 line doesn't count against your pool of local dial-up hours, so you aren't getting charged twice for the same connect time. When using the 800 number all you have to change in your setup is the phone number. All other settings should remain the same.

iPass

A lower-cost alternative to the 800 number is our iPass service. iPass provides roaming services for ISPs. With the iPass service you can dial a local number in most major cities in the US and many international locations for a much smaller hourly charge. For example most major US cities are available at about $3.12/hour (only a little over 4 cents a minute).

Using iPass is a little more complex than the 800 number. You need to download a program from our web site that will be your dialer program. This free software accesses a phonebook offering you a list of supported cities. For further information see Info & Tools: Traveling with iPass from our main site's navigation menu.

Charges:

   * Hourly charge: Based on your particular location. The dialing program will list the hourly charge next to the city.
     If you plan to use wireless or ethernet connections, please visit the iPass download page available from the 
     [Members Section] of our web site from pricing information.
    (Dial-up is usually about $3.12/hour in the continental United States. This is not true of the 'All-Cities' POPs)

Because iPass is actually dialing into another ISP in the city in which you're staying, the following section on using a different ISP while traveling also applies to iPass users.

Using another ISP

Many people have Internet service available through their employers, or have multiple Internet Service Providers. You shouldn't have any problem using multiple providers, but there are a few caveats you should be aware of.

Sending mail

Due to the increase of unscrupulous marketing companies (spammers) it is no longer possible to run a friendly, trusting mail server. Spammers use unprotected mail servers to bounce unsolicited bulk email in order to make is appear the mail is coming from a reputable source, and thus get around blocks and filters that would otherwise stop them.

What does this have to do with you? It means SWCP won't permit a machine that is not part of the SWCP trusted network to send email through our mail server to another non-SWCP address. If you are dialing in to another ISP, we have to find some way of identifying you as someone we can trust.

Sending email doesn't require authentication with a user name and password, the method we'd normally use to identify someone. Fortunately, though, receiving mail does, and we can use that to make a temporary exception in our defenses.

If you've dialed into an ISP other than SWCP (or if you are using iPass), you'll need to check mail before you try to send out any email through our server. Once you're done this (even if you don't have any pending email) your current IP address will be temporarily added to our "trusted" users and you'll be able to send email.

Reading News

In order to keep the news server available and responsive for our customers, SWCP doesn't allow non-customers to use it. Unfortunately if you're connected to the Internet via another ISP, we won't automatically know you're one of our customers. There are several work-arounds for this.

• You can telnet into login.swcp.com and use a local news program on our machines. From our menu program select "Mail & News", then "Read News". The default news reader is tin. Commands for tin are displayed on the bottom two lines of your telnet window while you're running tin.
• If you have a Static IP address you can contact SWCP and we'll add your address to our list of "trusted" news readers.
• If you don't have a static IP address and you need to regularly read news remotely we can set up a username and password for you.

Accessing Email via the web

We're also experimenting with several web based email packages. We've had good luck with them and it may be useful to you if you want to read email from something like an Internet Cafe. See SWCP Webmail Options link from the left navigation menu of our main site.

If you're using this from an Internet cafe there are a couple of security items to be aware of. If you're using Netscape be sure to exit your browser after using Twig (so your password isn't preserved). In Internet Explorer answer "No" to the save your password question.

Travel related articles in the SWCP knowledge base can be found in The Travel section of Knowledge Base.