Forget costly broadband – go roaming with a quality map

Arriving at the north Yorkshire cottage we visit twice a year, we found something unexpected on the kitchen table – a British ordnance survey map of the area.

But not just your regular regional map. The map’s title was that of the farm where we rent the cottage, the cover picture was one of the owners’ many working collies, and the map was centred on the cottage, at a 4cm to 1km resolution. The wonderful, numerous public access trails over the moors and through the dales were all clearly marked.

We’d always meant to get a map for the region on our regular visits. Now we had a highly detailed one for precisely this lovely little corner of the Pennines.

It turns out the UK Ordnance Survey has a custom maps service. For £16.99, they’ll produce either a rolled or folding map centred on a postcode, place or grid reference number. On the folding maps, you can choose a title for the cover and upload a cover image.

Particular affection

It’s a great idea for the owners of any holiday destination as an amenity for guests, or to order for an area you visit regularly, or have a particular affection for. I’d love to see the Irish Ordnance Survey offer something similar.

Modern digital technologies make such a nifty, personalised product possible. A one-off, professional-quality print run is easy with contemporary printers, which can also produce a one-off card map cover. At a time when national mapping bodies are offering maps digitally, as free or modest-charge downloads to a tablet or mobile phone, finding new ways of creating demand for a print product is a smart move. Personally, I much prefer hiking and driving with paper maps, not least if your device runs out of charge.

Darned expensive

But there’s a larger issue: it’s still so darned expensive to use broadband to a mobile device, especially when abroad.

I'll occasionally use the maps app on my iPhone in Ireland, but I'd never use it in the places I'd most obviously want to use it: when travelling outside the country.

A map download would have come in handy on this holiday a couple of times already, when we weren’t exactly sure if we were still on the trail on the map.

And every day, there are points where it would be very helpful to check an internet service – whether to get traffic reports, restaurant reviews, opening times for museums, or simply a news update from back home (or a World Cup score). But I won't do this unless I can get a wifi connection, and a free wifi connection is rarely around when you want one.

All this is supposed to change, thanks to an EU effort driven by digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes to lower the cost of broadband roaming. The legislation is in place now, and will use a carrot- and-stick approach to get operators to cut domestic mobile data roaming charges to domestic-cost levels by mid-2016.

Operators are starting to alter their offerings to comply. That’s why you have begun to see operators giving customers the ability to buy much lower-priced broadband roaming packages.

However, I have yet to sign up for any special broadband packages when I am heading away. I am sure the world is full of thrifty, well organised types who make sure they’ve made such arrangements, but I am not one of them and I would guess, lazier folks like me are in the majority.

Cost savings

That’s why we are generally reluctant to shift around between service providers of any type – electricity, gas, phone, health insurance – to get the best bargain. The Irish, statistically, have been pretty poor at taking advantage of costs savings like this.

I also tend to lose the will to live before I find what I am looking for on operator websites. Trying to get information on roaming offerings led me to out-of-date announcements about past legislation, for example, and I simply gave up trying to use web page menus. Operators don’t always make it easy to avail of services we want.

With broadband roaming, I suppose I’ll wait ’til mid-2016 when the lower rates should just automatically apply from most providers.

But I still won’t be giving up on my paper maps: those lovely, colourful, reliable, tangible companions to many a happy day’s roving, which never need a power point and are easy to read in the brightest summer’s day sunshine.