Wifi in Rome

So now we are down to the line and figuring out how we are going to stay connected on the street.  We do have wireless Internet in the apartment so we can do our Skype phone calls at night when it is 8 pm in Rome, 2 pm in New York and Pennsylvania, and 11 am in California.  (You can tell that I use this blog for thinking out loud and for remembering what I thought.)  Oh wait.  Isn't that when we are supposed to be out eating dinner??

The Fiumicino airport in Rome (it is in the town of Fiumicino and has the intials FCO although it is called the Leonardo da Vinci airport) has free wifi so we can phone when we arrive at 8:55am, although that might be a bit early for everybody back home.  We'll send off an email.  And also alert our AirBnB host of our arrival.  Oh oh.  I'm reading some posts on free wifi in Italy which say you have to put in an Italian cell phone number to use some free wifi...  Surely at the airport they don't expect all travelers to have an Italian phone number.

Un'Americana a Roma has a posting on Free Wi-Fi Hotspots in Rome which mentions the province of Rome’s free wifi network with over 300 access points throughout the city.  Unfortunately for this one you need to have an Italian cell phone number.  (Maybe we should get a SIM card for Fernando's travel cell phone.  Do you think it is still functional?  The last time we used it was 7 years ago!)

The wifi service at Fiumicino is provided by Boingo, which provides quite a few other hotspots in Rome and offers free wifi at its locations in the Americas for $4.98/month but outside of the Americas you have to pay an additional $0.12 or $0.18 per minute, so that's not as good a deal.  I think it is mainly a service to institutions.

Another idea is pocket wifi where you rent a device that provides a wireless hotspot around you for $7 a day for 150MB or $12.95 a day for unlimited Internet.  That's from TEP Wireless, a London company that says you can pick up and drop off the device at the airport.  The battery life is only 5 hours so we'd have to remember to charge it each night.

The Romeing Blog has an article on Free wif-fi in Rome, at the end of which she mentions WiTourist, which also offers pocket wifi service.  There is a location at the Fiumicino Airport, Carafelli Brothers, where you can pick up and drop off the device, which is 4€/day (about $5) for 1 gigabyte of data.

What would we use the wifi hotspot for?  To look at our Google map and get directions and information on the next bus or metro to our destination (we can save a static Google map but no directions).  To use our handy XE Currency converter (oh wait, it still works in airplane mode).  To make a dinner reservation or check out the restaurants around us.  To send WhatsApp text messages to each other in case one of us gets lost...