Thursday 18 August 2016

Mobile phones and rural life

As I've said before we've done the treechange thing.

Reluctantly we went back to Telstra for our internet service, but while it's more expensive, it's not been a terrible experience.

Our mobile phones have been a different story. We're both locked into contracts with Virgin (which is really Optus with a red t-shirt), and the contracts don't expire to June next year, and Optus only just flickers into life where we live meaning missed calls, texts, and making those bank transactions where they text you a security code a fun exercise.

In all the towns round about, Albury, Wangaratta, Myrtleford, Bright and so on they work fine. Even three blocks up they more or less work. But not just where we live.

So, what to do?

At home we have the internet for everything. The phones are good enough for most places we go to.

The only real problem is texts and calls when at home plus that nagging doubt about what to do if we have an emergency where we're out of range.

The answer is of course Telstra. So we bought a  pay as you go SIM, stuck it in the old Nokia Blackberry clone we use as a second phone when travelling which can go for days without a recharge and has QWERTY keyboard for texting, and when we activated the phone clicked the option on the SIM plan for  to say we wanted a long time between recharges rather than extra data - they give landline and internet customers a freebee in the hope we'll sign up for something more expensive down the track.

So we've got calls and texts, and minimal running costs, which is basically what we need - just such a pain to have to have an extra phone ...

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