This AT&T plan offers extended cellular telephone connect time at reasonable rates, having no roaming, long distance or air time charges. It would be fantastic for the RVer wanting to: call their home or business often and long, use as a regular telephone to receive incoming calls, or to provide the means to send and receive Email. Every call would be a local call. However, read on. It may or may not really apply for you !!!
Most RVers, with a PC on board, have been looking for a telephone connection solution for a long time. We have suffered through using acoustic couplers at payphones, begging for a connection at campgrounds, and trying to find modem friendly RV parks or other connection methods for a long time now. Many of us have tried cellular phones with a cellular enabled modem and found it simply too expensive, with roaming, air-time and long distance charges. Most of us have simple expectations. We wish to send and receive our Email and occasionally perform some on-line banking functions. Certainly, we would love to be able to surf the net, but just trying to keep up with Email has been challenging enough. Then some of us heard about the AT&T offering of a cellular one rate plan that has no roaming, no long distance or air time charges. For some reason, entire states did not receive the advertising, yet some states and cities were blanketed with AT&T one rate cellular advertising.
RV friends from California, Florida and some major cities started asking questions about it. I had no idea, and try as I did, couldn't find any advertising information on the subject, to include calling local and regional AT&T offices. It frustrated me and was almost like people were having some kind of mass hysteria dream, from having to deal with the problem for so long. I received at least 30 Email messages requesting information and felt helpless for answers. I certainly wanted to believe what I was hearing in those Email messages, because we too are searching for the answer to our long term communications connection problems.
I've finally found out why nobody in Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, or Iowa could answer my questions about the AT&T one rate plan. It was not offered there. You will see later why their answers seemed to run in circles. Those AT&T representatives simply didn't know much about it and didn't even have any literature available. While in Minneapolis Minnesota, a place it is offered, I finally got some straight answers from an AT&T Cellular sales store in the Mall of America. One of the constraints is that your cellular telephone number must be assigned by AT&T and your home coverage area (billing address) must be in the same AT&T cellular coverage area. There was no AT&T cellular coverage, in the places we were, until we arrived in Minneapolis.
You can enter into the plan only if your billing address is within one of the very few dark blue AT&T wireless services coverage areas on their AT&T, U.S. cellular coverage map. Otherwise you cannot. AT&T is hoping that most of your calls will be within that area and they simply pick up the roaming and long distance charges when you are not. Since they expect most of your long distance charges to be initiated from within their covered area, they can easily forward them over their own extensive long haul backbone network to the city you are calling.
AT&T got into the big time cellular business rather late. Contrary to their main purpose of being a long distance carrier, cellular is considered local carrier and they weren't interested in it or couldn't break into the early market. Apparently, they had to acquire their later bandwidth frequencies from the FCC in the range of 1900 Mega hertz. Normally cellular is in the 800 Mega hertz range. Evidently they contracted with Ericsson and Nokia for cellular phones that could handle it. The accepted cellular phones are the Nokia 6160 and Ericsson KH668 models and they must be purchased from AT&T at the time of contract (1 year). These phones are both dual mode (digital and analog) and dual band (800 and 1900 Mega hertz frequencies). AT&T offers text Email with the cellular phone. As far as I can determine, that is of no consequence because you should still be able to contact your ISP in analog mode and gather/send your Email normally at 2400 to 4800 BPS. All cellular data is handled over analog. There has never been digital "data" cellular phone capability, anywhere by any carrier, and no cell phone can perform data transfer in digital mode. Admittedly, 2400 to 4800 BPS is a very slow data rate. However with 10 hours of air time monthly, who cares if it takes longer to send and receive Email?
Rates are: $89.99 for 600 minutes a month, $119.99 for 1000 minutes and $149.99 for 1400 minutes. Calls over the contracted rate are a flat 25 cents per minute, anywhere, anytime in the US. However, Canada and Mexico calls are 15 cents a minute, 60 cents a minute roaming, plus any applicable wireless usage charge(?). It includes: Call forwarding, 3 person conferencing, caller ID, voice answering service, text Email on the cell phone, no roaming, no long distance or air time charges. For many RVers, including us, it would be well worth it. I could cancel my 800 number voice answering service, discontinue using my long distance calling cards, talk simultaneously to friends and relatives at two telephone numbers, have regular telephone service in the RV at many of the places we go to and not often need to use pay phones.
Tom Gonser, publisher of RversOnline, says people are having trouble acquiring the modem to cell phone cable. He's absolutely right. The AT&T representative I talked to said. "they have not yet manufactured the interconnecting cables to/from laptop PC modems, but are working on it". However, 3COM (previously US Robotics) does make them as well as many other modem vendors. I think AT&T might be saying they aren't available because they really don't want us using the phones for data connections to ISPs. Either that, or they are not yet prepared to make all the many types that would be necessary for all the different PCMCIA modems. However, they did not volunteer any information about else how to acquire them. I think they are trying to encourage people to use their text only, cellular phone Email. I don't see any realistic way they could stop it from being used to connect to a standard ISP, if one acquired the cable from 3COM, but I would want to test that myself. I have received Email from people who say they have done it. AT&T will not talk about it, period, except to say that usage is not within their offerings intention. I guess not, but so what? Neither is it their intention for us to often use their roaming service outside their cellular coverage area. That is obviously their gamble, but not everyone will use the service as they hope.
Just looking at the AT&T coverage map, Livingston Texas is not in one of their coverage areas. That excludes us and many other fulltime RVers, using a mail forwarding service address for billing, postal mail and a defacto street address. I would not like to, but I may have to, get a relative in Florida to contract the services and pay him as the monthly bills come in. Then again, it remains to be seen what would happen when & if AT&T discovered none of the calls were being sent from that area over an extended timeframe. It is not their desire to routinely provide the services we are looking for, no roaming charges for voice and/or data to any ISP as a local call while being mostly outside their coverage areas. As stated before, they are obviously hoping most calls will originate from within their covered area. At minimum, one must contract the service from an AT&T cellular sales office in an AT&T covered area and must also have a billing address in that same covered area. I showed my Florida drivers license and offered an address in Florida. They said I would have to contract for it when I got back there. This means actually being there and having a local billing address or getting someone to do it for you and reimbursing them for the costs. In the later case, it would be imperative that the call forwarding feature be turned off or disabled. Otherwise, your friend and benefactor would begin receiving your forwarded calls.
I know of a few people that have done away with the typical land line telephone and are using only cellular, so I don't know how AT&T would react to my saying," I want cellular as my only phone service and AT&T as my long distance carrier". I now know that AT&T representatives familiar with the one rate plan can be reached at 1-800-IMAGINE or online at www.att.com/wireless/ . If you want to find out about coverage in your billing area they can be contacted by either means. For 3COM or US Robotics interconnect cables, log on to www.3com.com . Look up the "cellular" modem model you selected and cross reference it to the cellular phone you are interested in purchasing from AT&T. You can order the cable directly from their WEB site or call it in to their posted telephone number.
If you have any questions or comments about this or any other "RV Computing" article or computing questions in general, send an Email to LMCHANEY@concentric.net and I would be glad to answer you.