Canadian Internet in the U.S

Thought I'd write about this as it has been an important topic for us and may well be for other Canadians as well.

We received a call this morning from Bell, they were calling to inquire if everything was okay with our service. I advised that it is BUT we needed a data plan we could take with us into the U.S, would there be anything they could do other than the 100mb for $5/day...

Turns out there is. We have now been switched to a Canada/US plan which allows us to take our current phones and data into the states with us. No hassle, no trouble. (at least that the theory, we'll see how it works). When we were researching the different companies - Verizon, AT&T, etc. they all have different coverage. We also looked into some mifi type units. Some work mostly in the Eastern U.S, most have spotty service in the Western U.S., but Bell's coverage map for the U.S. shows almost complete coverage.

My assumption here is that Bell has deals with all the American companies which affords us the most coverage. Fantastic! Sure, its not cheap but it is cheaper than the plan we are currently on which is only covering us for Canada. And did I mention its 20Gigs of data?!! We are on 25G at the moment so it will require some cutting back but it is minute relatively speaking.

Our cell phones will work there as they work here, though we will definitely have to cut down our data usage until we get a handle on it. Back at home we were using 58G/month so you can see there will be some trimming required. Before you all freak on me about our data usage, we are aware it is a lot.

Given we intend to boondock most of the time, our biggest concern now is for keeping everything electrified. Hopefully our solar will be the solution we hope it will be in that regard.