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It is intended to cover the standard means of communication with the folks back home and suppliers/companies here in the USA. The US Postal service is not included as that operates in the same way as postal services all over the world. Our chosen means of communication were Telephone, E-Mail and Internet:
Choice - Due to the fact that we would be constantly travelling around the western USA, the only possible solution was a mobile phone.
Provisioning - Our research showed that at this time AT&T had the best coverage across the USA. The local single state companies were cheaper but no use for our proposed lifestyle. So its AT&T for us.
We had some difficulty in obtaining a mobile phone mainly because we had no credit history in the USA. The problem was reported in code however, i.e. You do not have a Home phone? You do not have a US Social Security number? It took a whole business day to sort this one out.
It was resolved by a young guy at AT&T phoning a friend in another AT&T entity and solving bits of the problem at a time - use Passport Number on application form instead of Social Security number (this is to fool AT&T's computer), provide a valid credit card (they accept all major cards) and agree to have your bill charged to your credit card. We are not sure how much of the time spent on this was due to starting off in a relatively small city (Eugene) where they do not see so many incomers as compared to a major city like Portland or Seattle?
There are quite a few different types of contract according to:
Geography of coverage - Home state only is cheapest. All of USA is most expensive.
Prepaid air time - buying air time minutes at a cheap rate but if you don't use them they ain't cheap.
Roam time - Time system spends looking for you if you are outside your home area. You can make (or receive) calls to anywhere in the world from your home area without incurring roam time charges but if you make or receive calls outside your home area you incur roam time charges on top of air time charges and call charges.
The mobile phone system in the USA is a most "un-American" consumer rip-off. Each time a call is made to a mobile phone both the caller and the receiver of the call are charged "air time" and if either is outside their home area they will be charged "roam time". In addition the caller incurs call charges. You can understand that you need to study the different forms of contract carefully and identify the one that best satisfies your needs both financially and practically. Always ask if there are any special contracts that are not being promoted the day you enquire - they don't like it at first but their good manners and training force them into investigating further (true of most business dealings in the USA). The mobile phone service in the USA is still developing. Coverage around major cities and large towns is excellent but thins out considerably elsewhere. As we are travelling in mountainous areas and staying out in the country, we can be "out of service" for periods of time.
We chose a contract which covered seven western states (nearly all we needed) with 120 prepaid air time minutes for $24.99/Month. With this contract the Nokia 5160 handset cost $25. We are still monitoring our bills and now that we are into a more regular telephone routine we will, if necessary, adjust our prepaid minutes. The notable absentee states are Arizona & New Mexico where we intend to spend some time in the winter. Apparently when we near those states we contact AT&T and ask them to add those states as we have moved to that area temporarily. They do this free of charge we are told? but we don't know if they remove two of our existing states. We don't know what the situation is for Canada or Mexico? but will let you know when we come to them.
There are two mechanisms which, when combined, reduce the effect of all this overcharging:
1-800 (1-888) numbers - These numbers are free of connection charges but you still pay air time and roam time if applicable.
Phone Cards - Phone cards make every call a 1-800 call but the card company charge you a connection fee and a low per minute charge. Using a phone card makes for a lot of dialing - 1-800 number (11 digits) card number (10 digits) plus the number to be called, but the savings make it worth the hassle. Best we have found is 15 cents connection fee (75 cents international) and 5 cents/minute any time of day. Comparable Mobile Phone cost (domestic USA) without phone card when prepaid minutes are exhausted is 28 cents/minute air time and 15 cents/minute call charge. We leave you to do the arithmetic! Phone cards can be purchased in Supermarkets, Hardware stores, Convenience stores, Drug stores and lots of other outlets. The cheapest Phone Card we have found is the NICKEL card but there may be cheaper ones out there.
In addition there are a lot of phone cards advertised on TV but most of those are built into a home phone contract and of no use to us.
To use E-Mail you require access to a computer, a Modem and a telephone line. There are two places we have identified which allow access - local libraries and some print companies. We don't know if this is true of all libraries and print companies (suspect not). Apparently there are very few "internet cafe's" left in this part of the USA.
We therefore decided to buy a computer of our own.
We chose a laptop computer with built-in modem (Toshiba 2545CDS, $1400) as travelling in a truck and fifth wheel with a desktop would cause some problems. It would have to be anchored for travelling and would take up a large amount of space, and space is at a premium. What peripherals - they are all so cheap in European terms you want to buy them all! Who can resist a bargain? If you got a computer you need a printer, in our case a Cannon BJC250 Colour BubbleJet ($80) . The only other peripheral we purchased was a Hewlett Packard Scanner SJ3200C ($100). Prices are included here to emphasize how much we get ripped off in Europe.
Where to Buy - The major Electronic stores in this part of the world are Circuit City, Good Guys and Staples. Department stores and dedicated computer stores are another source. All sorts of companies provide mail order service at reduced prices. Costco (membership discount store) have limited choice at competitive prices.
Special Deals - Common ploys are - Cashback, fill in a form at time of purchase and get $xxx back (100 in our case) 6 to 8 weeks later. Free months trial on Internet with a particular provider. Pre-loaded software, mainly Lotus or Microsoft packages.
You can connect to E-Mail via your mobile phone but the transfer rate is slow (like the rate of 10 years ago we are told) and the cost is high - see Telephone above. We chose to connect to the public telephone system. To connect to E-Mail inexpensively you require a local number such that your connection is charged at the local rate (this means free in most of the USA). The local access number provision has not caught up with the demand and these are only provided for major towns and cities. Local calls are free in the USA, but all others are treated as long distance. If you don't have a local number it can be expensive to access E-Mail. As we are travelling and staying out in the country quite a lot we often don't have a local number. This is when a 1-800 number becomes a money saver once again, however unlike the telephone call system it ain't free! To access using a 1-800 number costs between 8 & 10 cents per minute, cheaper than long distance, O.K. for E-Mail if you can download then work off line, but still expensive for internet use. We access E-Mail through a telephone line provided on the RV site. These lines are set-up such that you can only use a local number or a 1-800 number i.e. no charge to the RV site.
Internet Providers - There are no FREE providers in the USA like FREESERVE in Britain. All the providers have various contracts based on the number of hours access per month e.g. $9.95 buys you 10 hours and each additional hour costs 99 cents, $24.95 buys you unlimited access. We researched the various providers for cost using 1-800 numbers and Motel phone (free), read various computer publications and found that for travelling around only AOL, Compuserve and AT&T fitted our needs. Apparently AT&T is the coming provider in the USA - best quality of service, more access numbers and expanding rapidly (makes you wonder about shares in AOL and Compuserve especially if AT&T do a FREESERVE?). Our laptop came equipped with a months free trial with AT&T and access scripts for AOL and Compuserve:
Compuserve - Have no 1-800 access provision so they are no good to us!
AOL - Since we were having great trouble with AT&T (more of this later) tried AOL. All the registration is done by computer via the internet, real technology at work? Part of the registration requires entry of a Credit Card number along with details of exactly how and to whom the card was issued and when?(the colour of our underwear at the time of issue? - might have been easier). We knew the card was valid as we had just bought our shiny new laptop not to mention numerous meals and other essentials of life. Needless to say we failed this technology test several times even after studying statements and other correspondence from VISA. Not to worry 1-800 number (FREE) provided for help line to fix within minutes. Two days later (we did have other things to do) after trying various remedies they suggested, some apparently stupid, some downright crazy and some that could only be a wind-up, we asked the simple question. "Can you take our credit card details over the phone and run the credit check yourself". Answer "No sir. Only the computer is allowed to do a credit check". Is this another technology company which cannot adjust to the real world? or do AOL have so many customers they can afford to turn new ones away? This question was posed to help line operator who didn't seem to know that answer either! (see comment above re AOL shares!)
AT&T - Problems we had with AT&T were mainly due to the bonus months FREE trial that came with our laptop. If you have a months free trial you can't access using a 1-800 number! In that case we don't want the months FREE trial! But you already have the months FREE trial! But if it's stopping us accessing as we want to we don't want it! This seems like a technical problem why don't you call our Techies? OK its another 1-800 number - it's FREE? After a few hours we get some sort of solution which allows us access but it does not have a comfortable "feel". Two days later we change location and no longer have access! Help line time again and again and again! Finally we get a Techie who for some reason believes we are P----- Off with AT&T (can't imagine how he got that impression) and he provides us with a magic script to fool the system until our FREE month is over! By this time it just about is what with our sidetrack to AOL and credit card mysteries! In spite of all this we sign up with AT&T (we know it seems crazy but consider our alternatives?).
Even if you are computer literate it would be wise to stay somewhere for a few days that gives you easy and unlimited access to the internet to sort out the computer you have purchased and download any software required. This took us a period of weeks until we settled at last using Outlook Express to manage the whole E-Mail process. This reduces the amount of time spent on-line thus saving money. If you already have a Laptop which operates off 110V bring it with you and save a lot of hassle!
We decided to have our own HomePage to allow friends and acquaintances to follow our progress across the western USA. We also thought that our experiences in the planning and logistics of this undertaking might be of value to anyone who wanted to do something similar.
Most internet providers allow you X megabytes of space free of charge. Some allow you to set up multiple mail accounts and provide 5-10 Mb/s of Web space per mail account. GeoCities and CyberCities are two of many free providers easily found by surfing the Web. We chose GeoCities (now part of Yahoo) because we found it had the friendliest interface (this is not quite the same as friendly!). You require an HTML authoring tool to make Web page creation easy and an FTP package to transfer your files from your computer to the Web. Our Laptop came equipped with two HTML packages and we already had another. FTP packages can be downloaded from the Web free of charge but we had some difficulty obtaining the official FTP address of some providers - too busy to answer E-Mail, address given didn't work (must be me?), server not responding (quite common).
GeoCities provide an On-Line FTP service which plucks the files from your computer and puts them in your allocated Web space. This is not quite as simple as it sounds but if you obtain one of their approved HTML authoring tools it should be relatively simple. They also provide an authoring tool for your use (but being on-line costs money) which should make life simple? but remember this is the computer world!
The provision of our HomePage is taking some considerable time due to our intermittent access to the Internet, but if you can read this we have finally made it.
Hyperlinks that may be of interest:
People visited
GeoCities