The Bane of Internet for Full-Timers

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.