Cellular phones are a wondrous invention. No longer are we tied to the umbilical of the wire line telephone. Almost anywhere, one can simply whip out the little cell set and phone home. Or in our case, someone else's home.
Let's go right to the heart of cell phones. Verizon is the largest wireless carrier in the country, Cingular is number two, close behind Verizon. AT&T is number three and Sprint is a distant fourth. Does this mean that Verizon has better coverage? No, the top three have just about the same geographic coverage areas. You see, they all share services and have agreements with other cell carriers to put your calls through. No carrier has a truly nationwide network. They just use someone else's technology and revenue share with each other. Sprint is an exception. They have their own PCS network and it is great if you are in a metropolitan area or following some of the major traffic corridors. However, if you are off in Why, Arizona (real place, don't think Sprint is there) you might be off their network and could be charged both long distance and roaming up to 69 cents per minute. As a retired phone guy, I don't recommend them to RVers because we tend to go places they don't. If you stay near cities, they can be very effective.
Cell phones are just radios. If you are behind a hill or mountain and the cell tower cannot see your phone, you are not going to make a call. If you are in a very rural area where it just isn't economically feasible to place a cell, you are not going to make a call. After all, none of these companies are non profit. Since they all share services at some place or another across the country, the billing cycle of the company where you actually placed the call might not be the same as the cycle you have with your carrier. Then you run the risk of having minutes placed in one month, show up a month or even more later on a subsequent bill. Lots of folks have experienced this. Trust me, this is not a plot by big brother to make you pay more. Our solution is to have a plan that has more minutes than we use. That way, we never go over and pay the premium of .25 a minute or .35 cents a minute for overtime. It doesn't take too many of those calls to put one over the difference in plan costs. As an example, our 600 minute plan with Cingular was $89.95, our 900 minute plan is $99. For less than $10 I got 5 more hours. It would only take 40 minutes of overtime to get to that rate on the lower plan. I get piece of mind knowing that I won't go over. and it is only costing me $10 a month.
I use our cell phone for limited web surfing and for e-mail. I have an Ositech cell enabled modem. 3 Com also makes a cell modem, but it costs more and the cable to connect it to your cell phone costs more. Either will work just fine. There are probably more vendors out there, I just don't know about them. The fastest I can connect to the net with my cell modem and phone is 9.6 kbps. This is just fine for text messaging which is what e-mail is. However, if someone sends you a picture, look out. It will take a long time to download and might even cause your connection to drop out. There are some remedies for this, short of a baseball bat that I will explain later.
When I connect via the cell phone several things happen. I use Netscape so I get a message that says dialing, then verifying name and password and then logging on to network. When I see the logging on to network message, I open Netscape and go to my inbox. Even though the computer says it is still logging on, in reality, I am already logged on and can download my e-mail. Many times I have my e-mail downloaded before I get the totally connected message. I just disconnect when I get all the messages. That way, I am not wasting dead air time waiting for the message to come up.
When your computer says loading 1 of 56 and it just sits there, you can be sure someone has sent you a graphics file. When this happens, if it doesn't load in a reasonable time, I get out of my mailbox, go to the net and access Mailstart.com. Then I can look at the messages in my in bin and delete the offending picture before going back to download the rest of my mail. Your are looking at it on someone's server through mailstart, so you don't wait for the pic to load on your hard disk.
Dialing in on your cell phone is much more difficult to do at rush hour. Try to make your e-mail calls after 9 a.m. and before 4 p.m. After 7 in the evening is ok as is before 7 in the morning. Remember, you are sharing bandwidth will all the regular users. If congestion causes too many retries, the modem at either end will drop the call.
I find the cell phone to work just fine in most instances for collecting and sending e-mail. It is less than stellar when trying to surf the net and forget graphics.
For those times when even the cell phone won't work, we use Pocketmail. Pocketmail is a little Personal Display Assistant with a full function, but tiny, keyboard and an acoustical modem on the back. Connect speeds are around 2.4kbps, but for text messages, it is fine. The limitation are: no graphics or attachments, 4k limit on messages. You can access the system as many times a day as you want, and all calls go to an 800 or 877 toll free number. We used Pocketmail in Canada last summer and I understand there is now an international toll free number for those of you traveling to other countries outside of the US and Canada. Sometimes you will find a coin phone that will not work with Pocketmail. Just go find another phone. Those occasions are not a sinister plot by the local phone company to keep you from making a call. It is just a dirty line. If there is too much noise on the line at your end, in the middle or at the other end, the call will not complete. Some folks think the phone company monitors data calls, but it is not true. In fact, the call from a modem is nothing more than an analog voice call just like when you call your bookie!
Besides the fact that it is illegal for the phone company to monitor your call, they have no way to tell the difference between a normal voice call and the call from your modem. They are both analog calls. If they were digital, it wouldn't make any difference either, but they are analog.
Happy dialing.
John