As most full-time RVers know, trying to figure out the best and least
expensive way of having phone and internet service is a challenge. Although you can use WIFI in many of the
parks, you cannot rely on it and it’s not wise to use these or other public
WIFIs for doing your personal banking, paying bills and so on.
For the past several years the two places we spent most of our time had
very bad cell and internet service. Some
of our problem also dealt with the fact that we were under a metal cover at
both locations. To resolve this, we put
up cell phone boosters at both locations for Verizon and AT&T and that
greatly enhanced our ability to have both internet and cell service. However, in the past year something changed
drastically and the phone boosters, which were specific to our service
provider, weren’t doing the job. We
finally broke down and purchased a prepaid flip phone with US Cellular just to
have phone service and I forwarded my phone to the flip phone. The internet, on the other hand was just
getting worse and worse.
This past week I became so disenchanted with no internet that I spent
hours researching other ideas. Now that
we are exclusively based in one location in the woods outside of Sulphur, OK I
found that we could add internet through our Dish service, get ATlink, or
switch service completely to US Cellular and ditch Verizon. Whatever we did, it had to be internet service
that we could carry with us. All but one
of these ideas were just adding to our already expensive service, so we decided
to give the least expensive way a try.
After three hours at a US Cellular office, we switched our service from
Verizon to US Cellular unlimited. The
perks they provided were incredible. We
are going to receive a big enough credit to pay off John’s Verizon phone, we
both got new phones, we ported our numbers over, and we were given two goodie
bags worth $100 each. Because we did
this, we also shut off our prepaid flip phone.
In the end with the monthly cost, plus the monthly payment for the two
phones, plus a monthly protection fee we will be paying $15 a month less than
we were with Verizon and the flip phone.
The goodie bags had nice Bluetooth headsets, portable charges, portable Bluetooth
speakers and some other things in them.
Wow.
We had already purchased a Weboost cell phone booster a while back that
is supposed to work for all the major companies, including US Cellular, that we
could use when traveling and when we launched that we went from 3G and 1-2 bars
to 4G and several bars on our phones! Life
has gotten considerably better.
With all new equipment and phones and a new company, we are still
saving money, have much better service and have unlimited service!!! The unlimited service also allows us 10 GB
hotspot service per phone per month. We
could never have gotten this deal for this price from Verizon. Hopefully we will have service most places we
travel. I do know that when traveling
west it may be spotty but so was our service with Verizon. When I had AT&T I never had service when
traveling west. I don’t think there are
any services that are all that great throughout the west.
Welcome to our little challenges when living full-time in an RV.
