Trustive has released a fascinating worldwide connectivity plan that charges per MB for 3G and per minute for Wi-Fi: I've seen variants of this before, but I believe Trustive has the only service with this scope.
It works this way: you sign up for €99, which includes a €54 credit for service and a Trustive SIM card. If you don't have an unlocked USB 3G modem, Trustive offers one for €150. There's a €15 shipping fee, too. I've queried the company's PR folks about whether this covers shipping to countries outside the United Kingdom, and whether the offer is available to people in all the countries listed in its sign-up form.
With that in hand, you can connect to Wi-Fi and 3G network in over 70 countries (Trustive provides a list). All Wi-Fi access is billed at 9 euro cents (€0.09) per minute, with no minimum, regardless of data transferred.
3G use is tiered: Zone A countries, which include the United States, most European nations, India, and China (but not Canada or Mexico), cost €1.50 per MB. Zone B countries are a whopping €15 per MB.
Trustive has some bugs to work out in its explanation, however. The USA, Canada and other countries appear in both Zone A and Zone B lists with no explanation. And text on the service's home page is full of strange errors:
"A WiFi internet access service via 140,000 premium WiFi hotspots located in hotels, airports, bars & restaurants... accross 70+. As long s you are within 50m of a hotspot, you can enjoy connection speeds of up to 50 Mbps."
You can catch the typos, missing words, and errors. And the egregious claim that a Wi-Fi hotspot can deliver 50 Mbps. First off, a wireless LAN using 802.11g can pump 20 to 25 Mbps over short distances; second, most hotspots don't have more than several Mbps backhaul to the net, anyway.
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