Older gearheads, please advise on portable net/BBS gear.

[solidgoldbrass]

At what point would a fairly geeky sort of person have had something that would allow either Net access or BBS access while sitting in a pub? IE when did people start using either wireless or internet-accessing mobile phones?
It's for a piece of fiction I'm writing, and I don't want to make a howling chronological error...

Bump for the evening posters...

Internet access via mobile phones was first available using GPRS, which was not available before 2000 according to wikipedia. I can't find anything definitive on commercial Wifi hotspots. Wifi was invented in the 1990s, but it was probably not available in pubs before 2000. BT apparently claim Wifi arrived in Britain in 2002. I guess they mean the first hotspots were in 2002? If so they wouldn?t have been widespread until later.

Thanks CAUP. 2002 is too late for the plotline, though. I asked on Facebook as well and someone did give me a much better solution (at least, for the purposes of my fiction) - put the characters in an internet cafe...

Basically I am very glad I asked, because I am a techno-dork and got my leg pulled for years over mixing up two computer game systems in a former novel...

I connected a satellite phone to a Mac PowerBook Duo in about 1998 for a very hi-tech world traveller. It would have worked at about 9600 bps and I don't think was ever used for real, but it would have done slow email if necessary. The same thing could be done with some mobile phones at that time, but it was a very slow and expensive way of getting on line. I was routinely getting on line with an infrared mobile phone connection in 2000 or maybe 2001. {geek emoticon}