Connecting to the Internet From your Motorhome

Written May 2004

We often get asked "How do you publish a website from the motorhome" or "how do you send and receive emails". The answer is of course via mobile phone. No big secret in that - the trick is to do it without spending the weekly budget on mobile phone bills.

The following should not be considered 'the best' way of connecting - it is just the way that suits us best and seems to be the most economical (both to setup and run). If you know of a better way, by all means let me know.

Hardware

We use an IBM notebook and a Telstra Next-G mobile phone. The Phone connects to the notebook using a USB cable. We also have a large external 14db antenna and a car kit. The antenna is fantastic for pulling in signal and will double the number of days you can connect if you spend time outside of towns and cities. Make sure you use a Next-G antenna as a GSM antenna will connect but will not work.

One issue is that you need to have the phone in the car kit cradle to use the external antenna. This is sometimes not ideal to have a long USB cable across the motorhome floor. Bluetooth would be much better Although our phone supports Bluetooth - it can not be used to access the modem function

 

Plans

Telstra have a number of plans that allow you to select a 'loyalty benefit'. Options include 100 free text messages, low cost calls to nominated numbers and "My Hour".

My hour allows you to nominate a single hour of the day, during this hour you can make calls to any number in Australia (including mobile and satellite phones) at no cost. Any one call must not exceed 20 minutes. So, every night at 6pm (our chosen hour) we use the phone for 19 minutes and 30 seconds and talk to whoever we want to. If we need more than 20 minutes, we simply dial again for another 20 minute window.

Our plan costs are about $30 per month. Our call costs are typically almost $0 as we are careful to make all calls during our hour. You can get lower cost plans that allow you to use 'my hour'. We use a Telstra data plan to connect to the Internet - this is quite expensive at $49/mth for just 200Mb of data-but it is quite fast

Notes

• Do everything you can to stop spam. The last thing you want is to spend 20 minutes downloading crap messages offering to increase the length of your penis or sell you Viagra.
  

• Compose and read your messages off-line.
  

• 1 second over the 20 minutes or outside the hour means you get charged for the call - watch the time carefully.
  

 

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