[mamcx]

> Additionally, you won't be able to carry your laptop around the city because there is no concept of "hot spots"

I live here. And my brother travel all around the city, so if in USA you can get wifi free everywhere then this is true, otherwise we don't see that get internet acces is difficult at all..

[brerlapn]

Free wifi is likely less available there than we are used to in the US. I went to Europe last year for vacation and it was hard to find free wifi, too. I almost got stranded in Denmark one day because my credit card didn't work in Europe (no smartchip), and I had counted on using wifi to contact the person I was staying with. Every place in the US that I use for free wifi was charging for it in Europe, and even then it was harder to find paid wifi hotspots than back here in the US. In the US, you can get free wifi at any Starbucks, McDonald's, public library, most coffee shops, a lot of restaurants--we have come to expect it to be in a lot of places. When traveling, only hotels that are aimed at business travelers charge for wifi in the room (because business travelers aren't paying for any of it and thus don't care about the added cost for wifi)--the cheaper hotels offer it for free. When the OP complained about not having hot spots in Medellin, that's the expectation he's got--and he'd probably make the same complaint about Sweden, Denmark, or Switzerland (I know I did).

EDIT: On review, basically what Ivanca said.

[_delirium]

It should definitely not be hard to find wifi in Denmark. The biggest coffee chain (Baresso) has wifi at all locations that isn't even passworded, and most smaller cafes have a hotspot with a password (in Copenhagen at least, working in coffee shops on laptops is very common). There is also wifi at public libraries, on the buses, on the commuter rail, in malls, at museums, etc. And in Sweden, every 7-11 has wifi, which means that hotspots are almost literally everywhere. I doubt you could walk more than a few blocks in Copenhagen or Stockholm without hitting free wireless.

[brerlapn]

Ah, well I wasn't trying to throw any stones at Denmark or Sweden. My point, probably phrased with too many words, was just that nobody would go to Denmark expecting chickens in the street or no civilization, but wifi just wasn't as available as I'm used to in the US there, either. (It was free at 7-11 in Denmark, too, although only for 10 minutes--that was still long enough to save me from spending a long afternoon at the train station in Aarhus.)

[ivanca]

"Hot spot" is not data plan, is using real WiFi to get work done specially in coffee shops. But not even "Juan Valdez" here in Colombia has power sockets available for customers to use; while most of them in USA (at least in California) are filled with them.

I lived in the US for some months, and then I tried to keep working on coffee shops when I came back here, but in Bogota is just not possible. The most similar thing is working from libraries, but you can't eat nor drink on those so it's very inconvenient.