Fit to be Tethered Mobile technology can relieve you from the Wi-Fi access charges dragging down your travel budget.

If you spend much of your life working from hotel rooms in various cities, the good news is that most of them are now equipped with high-speed Internet access. The bad news comes at checkout, when you realize that 24-hour stretches of high-speed Internet at $10.95 actually do add up.

That cost is a good argument for using the local 3G mobile network instead. However, most laptops still don't have 3G access built in, and most phones are not always an adequate replacement for a laptop.

Like many business travelers, three guys from Halifax, Nova Scotia--Patrick Hankinson, his brother Stephen Hankinson and friend Timothy Burke--experienced this challenge firsthand. To overcome it, they created a tethering application that allows laptops to tie into a smartphone such as the BlackBerry to use its 3G connection and your existing mobile data service plan as a high-speed Internet alternative.