London Calling

Well here we are in the Old Dart. My future son in law Tim is an IT professional who was working in London at the time and was able to help me set up my phone for accessing the Internet. My intention was to obtain a data only Sim card (which is what I had in Australia) so that I could put that in our MiFi and that would enable us to connect our laptops iPhone and iPad2 (which I picked up in Dubai before the world-wide simultaneous release).
Wrong! while there are devices like MiFi on the market in the UK they are generally tied in with landlines or mobile accounts and are not available on prepaid or short term contracts. This means that the only option is to get a general phone Sim with phone, SMS, and data. The data component  can be added to if the 1 Gig limit is exceeded. The Sim cards can be topped up over the net - BUT - you will need a UK credit account. Our  credit cards wouldn't work. Local shops will do it for you (and accept your Australian credit cards as well).
However for all of your travel needs in Europe it is worthwhile investigating getting a local credit account which will enable you to not only top up your phone accounts online, but will allow you to hire street pushbikes in Europe which require a European credit card as a deposit.
I had been in contact with the MiFi Manufacturers since Dubai and attempts to update the firmware from the provided patch meant that the device was unable to complete the update properly and wouldn't work at all. A new device couldn't be sourced from the UK as it was sourced from a third-party. This ended any hope of using this device in Europe.
With this option out it left phone tethering as our only viable option, as my computer dongle was locked to Telstra and it wasn't possible to unlock it from the UK.
Note: When attempting to connect a dongle or phone to a new network overseas it is best to get it connected and configured at the point of purchase of the Sim as it can involve registering the Sim on the network via a website. If you don't have a screen (with the MiFi Device) this becomes hard, even with the phone or computer option it can be hard in foreign languages. In Italy even when I was registering using the English page option - after navigating through several screens it reverted to the default Italian language. This is not necessarily the fault of the site, but due to the default rendering of the websites based on your locale and the service providers settings. ie if you are connecting to the web from a village in Italy it will sometimes default to Italian even though you have specified English as your browser default, and have selected the English page on a selected webpage.
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