Some things work in PNG … and some things don’t. We have been having some telecommunications difficulties recently with our rinky-dink global go-anywhere SIM cards, and have also been seriously starved of internet access (well, internet access below $15 a day, and that actually works when you do pay the money). So, what to do?

Well, the answer is: (warning, Geek alert)

• Buy a prepaid local SIM card from Digicel PNG (these are absolutely everywhere, perhaps surprisingly)
• Set it up in my iPhone (so far, so good, and there are instructions for this)
• Subscribe to a prepaid data service
• “Fudge” (from first principles / guesswork / a little white hat inspiration) the Digicel internet tethering APNs to allow the iPhone to act as a data access point
• Physically wire it to my laptop (I don’t have an iPhone 4, so I can’t do this wirelessly)
• Use Connectify on the laptop to set up a wifi hotspot to help out any other tourists in need (and possibly recoup some of my initial SIM card investment…)

And there you go. 100MB of data? 20 Kina (about $10). The feeling of smug satisfaction for having worked out something like this while out in the bush? Priceless!

Caption: Checking the blog comments, while bird of paradise spotting at the Kumul Lodge in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea.