What I have learned about Prepaid phone services- the hard way

[johndeerefarmer]

We frequently camp at Beavers Bend State Park in OK. Since I moved our phones to Verizon, we have no cell service in the park. To get any type of connection we have to drive four or 5 miles to the top of a dam. That's a pain as today most like to be "connected" multiple times per day. We both have elderly parents and have to check on them.
Anyway, sometime last year my girlfriends daughter joined us on a camping trip. She had AT&T and got service. We used her phone to text and call. Data worked too but a little slow. So I looked for a cheap ATT plan for a spare phone just for the time we are out of Verizon range. I signed up for Red Pocket Mobile. At home it worked great. Next trip to the same campground it didn't work at all. I drove into town where I had used ATT years ago- no signal. I then discovered that Red Pocket couldn't access all of the same towers that ATT did. I then tried Consumer Cellular because they said they worked anywhere ATT did. Guess what? Didn't work at all!
A couple of months ago I decided to try again. ATT Prepaid had a $15 month "corona virus" special. I signed up for it. We went back to the same park. This time we went a day earlier with the plan my girlfriend would do her work from there via the ATT phone. Guess what!! Got there and it wouldn't work. (Note: I met a couple in the park. The wife had ATT postpaid and he had ATT prepaid. He said his phone only worked half the places her's did) Now what do we do? Go home or have her call in sick?
Luckily we had just bought a new 2020 Ford SD. It has a cellular modem on ATT. I was able to sign up for a free 3Gb 3 month trial plan. She was able to connect to the truck's hotspot. She had 4 bars and LTE service. The only problem is you have to leave the ignition turned on for the modem to work and every 45 minutes it shuts off to save the batteries- but she made it through the day without issues. I decided that I didn't want to continue with the data plan on the truck for several reasons, one the power issue mentioned above and two we couldn't make phone calls or text. (our unlocked phones don't have wifi calling- though I just downloaded Google Voice and will try that)
When we got home I decided the best thing to do was just move my girlfriends phone over the AT&T POSTPAID. i put her on the plan with 15Gb hotspot. So now we have both Verizon and ATT phones with 15Gb of data. Hopefully one or the other will work in most places. If we see that 15Gb isn't enough we can always just go online and up or plan to the next level and then next month put it back

So now I figured I had it all figured out! Then I read somewhere that AT&T limits you to 200-400M of data when roaming. I then read our new ATT plan and it says roaming speeds can be at 2G! We didn't observe any slowdown when using the ATT plan on the Ford truck so I don't know if we will have any issues or not.

I do know one thing- we won't plan on her working from camp until we test AT&T and see how much roaming data we can get and the speed.

I did some research on cellular service around the Broken Bow area. Pine Communications a regional carrier has multiple towers around. Verizon has one. So the ATT signal must be coming from the Pine Communications towers. When we do get into Verizon range it says extended network.

So besides testing ATT next time I bought a Mofi 4500 router, Proxicast mimo antenna and two coaxes. I am going to see if I can hit the Verizon tower there and maybe have a backup for the ATT in case it runs out of data

One final note, when I saw Consumer Cellular didn't work I thought if I just quit paying the bill they would shut it off. Nope! They sent me emails for several months and finally said if I didn't pay them $65 they would turn me into a collection agency....... On the other hand when I saw ATT Prepaid didn't work their website says to have it shutoff just quit paying the bill- so I did and have had no issues like Consumer Cellular

Hopefully this helps someone.

[Headin Out 2]

https://www.mygrandrv.com/forum/show...or-Full-Timing

you may want to refer to this thread...if you're trying to set up an online type work office ours is working without any problems !! MoFi set up is fantastic, I thinks davematthewsband uses the same thing as well. Mofi system can use several different providers and there are several out there that offer unliimited/unthrottled service ! Good luck ! Rich.

[livinthelife]

We frequently camp at Beavers Bend State Park in OK. Since I moved our phones to Verizon, we have no cell service in the park. To get any type of connection we have to drive four or 5 miles to the top of a dam. That's a pain as today most like to be "connected" multiple times per day. We both have elderly parents and have to check on them.
Anyway, sometime last year my girlfriends daughter joined us on a camping trip. She had AT&T and got service. We used her phone to text and call. Data worked too but a little slow. So I looked for a cheap ATT plan for a spare phone just for the time we are out of Verizon range. I signed up for Red Pocket Mobile. At home it worked great. Next trip to the same campground it didn't work at all. I drove into town where I had used ATT years ago- no signal. I then discovered that Red Pocket couldn't access all of the same towers that ATT did. I then tried Consumer Cellular because they said they worked anywhere ATT did. Guess what? Didn't work at all!
A couple of months ago I decided to try again. ATT Prepaid had a $15 month "corona virus" special. I signed up for it. We went back to the same park. This time we went a day earlier with the plan my girlfriend would do her work from there via the ATT phone. Guess what!! Got there and it wouldn't work. (Note: I met a couple in the park. The wife had ATT postpaid and he had ATT prepaid. He said his phone only worked half the places her's did) Now what do we do? Go home or have her call in sick?
Luckily we had just bought a new 2020 Ford SD. It has a cellular modem on ATT. I was able to sign up for a free 3Gb 3 month trial plan. She was able to connect to the truck's hotspot. She had 4 bars and LTE service. The only problem is you have to leave the ignition turned on for the modem to work and every 45 minutes it shuts off to save the batteries- but she made it through the day without issues. I decided that I didn't want to continue with the data plan on the truck for several reasons, one the power issue mentioned above and two we couldn't make phone calls or text. (our unlocked phones don't have wifi calling- though I just downloaded Google Voice and will try that)
When we got home I decided the best thing to do was just move my girlfriends phone over the AT&T POSTPAID. i put her on the plan with 15Gb hotspot. So now we have both Verizon and ATT phones with 15Gb of data. Hopefully one or the other will work in most places. If we see that 15Gb isn't enough we can always just go online and up or plan to the next level and then next month put it back

So now I figured I had it all figured out! Then I read somewhere that AT&T limits you to 200-400M of data when roaming. I then read our new ATT plan and it says roaming speeds can be at 2G! We didn't observe any slowdown when using the ATT plan on the Ford truck so I don't know if we will have any issues or not.

I do know one thing- we won't plan on her working from camp until we test AT&T and see how much roaming data we can get and the speed.

I did some research on cellular service around the Broken Bow area. Pine Communications a regional carrier has multiple towers around. Verizon has one. So the ATT signal must be coming from the Pine Communications towers. When we do get into Verizon range it says extended network.

So besides testing ATT next time I bought a Mofi 4500 router, Proxicast mimo antenna and two coaxes. I am going to see if I can hit the Verizon tower there and maybe have a backup for the ATT in case it runs out of data

One final note, when I saw Consumer Cellular didn't work I thought if I just quit paying the bill they would shut it off. Nope! They sent me emails for several months and finally said if I didn't pay them $65 they would turn me into a collection agency....... On the other hand when I saw ATT Prepaid didn't work their website says to have it shutoff just quit paying the bill- so I did and have had no issues like Consumer Cellular

Hopefully this helps someone.

That's why my husband & I have different services on our phones (Verizon & AT&T). There are times where one doesn't work, but the other does (and vice versa). I learned that from my sister who was RVing before we were. We didn't want to wind up in the middle of nowhere needing to contact emergency services.