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As good as AT&T and Verizon are with coverage there are plenty of places you won't get a signal. Even in the middle of the city there was a Food Lion I could not get service through AT&T but I always could with Sprint. I'll generally connect to WiFi for this reason when I'm inside of a WalMart.
If you can get internet service into the ranch you can always use WiFi and do Hangouts, Facetime, WhatsApp, Skype, etc. You wouldn't need any data plan if you were to go that route but you would only be able to make calls when connected via WiFi. The average soft cap these days is so high you'd never reach it if you were to only use the WiFi for that purpose. You can talk for an hour on around 45 MB, depending on the service. There are plenty of apps if you need to make an actual phone call; Hangouts Dailer, Skype, Viber, TextNow, Talkatone. I've used all of them. Hangouts Dailer has the best sound quality, but you will need a Google Voice account to make outgoing calls.
There are plenty of companies that will sell you a phone without a data plan. GoPhone offers unlimited talk and text without any data for $30 a month. I know because I used it. I had to pay $5 for 250 MB on that plan. That got old quick, so I'm now on the $45 for 4 GB plan. That's about as cheap as it gets.
If you have a landline company you can probably get Internet from them and go that route. You'd probably get better service through your WiFi than you would with copper, considering how far you'd be from the phone company. DSL would be sufficient. If you're trying to do multiple things, then you may want to look into other options. Worst case scenario the provider will charge you a huge one time fee to run infrastructure out there, in which case you might want to give satellite a look.
The thing with my landline company is that getting anything else besides phone service from them is considered to be a VERY BAD IDEA.
As it goes, what I need is phone service on my phones and internet on my computer, so I am probably back to keeping my Razr and figuring out to talk on that. I guess the smartphone, rural or not, is again shelved because I really don't have a need for it.
It's not that I need the smartphone for Internet; I work M-F, 40 hours a week linked into the Net. Net wise, if worse comes to worse, I can play submarine games. Come to the surface at work, do my Net comms then, submerge when I go home and go silent.
I just thought that the smartphone was the absolute answer to a telephone, to be able to make phone calls anytime, anyplace. I guess not and now with my landline phone company telling me they can wire me up, transfer my phone numbers, the smartphone is surplus to needs.
Thank you, though.
EDIT: It has been suggested that I need a repeater. While I have started researching that, what can the brains of the hive tell me about such?
Last edited by TamaraSavannah; 12-15-2016 at 01:30 AM..
EDIT: It has been suggested that I need a repeater. While I have started researching that, what can the brains of the hive tell me about such?
A problem many people have is their cell phones do not work well in all parts of their home. Usually the basement is a problem,but it or they have a sweet spot in their house near the dining room window on the south side.
Another much more expensive solution is a repeater, which will probably cost you over $500. Some models are $800 and others are cheaper. Many people are able to persuade their cell phone providers to give them a repeater. My neighbor got one from Verizon. The providers like it especially if it helps your neighbors. http://buy.weboost.com/get-the-conne...h7BBoC16zw_wcB
Last edited by PacoMartin; 12-15-2016 at 10:27 PM..
Yay! I have one of those and am well satisfied. The camera can take great shots. You may find yourself using it a lot in your work.
Thank you, but I doubt it. Mine is a specific tool for a specific task, not one thing that does all even if that is an odd statement from a Generalist Extraordinaire. As I told the salesperson, I am keeping my Razr for day to day, around town communications and using the SE for the ranch house phone (two lines on my account). If the Razr is ever lost, the security compromise is low; I'm not so sure the same can be said for the SE.
The other thing about not using the camera on the phone is I rather detest this concept of technology that blackmails me so I can get my pictures. As I understand it, I can't just download pics taken but rather, have to email them somewhere and hence, have to pay to get them. That's a far different concept from plugging my DSLR or its card into my laptop. For that reason alone, it is in the plan, on a side note, to get a smaller digital camera that allows me to "film" workshop dances.
Further, my concept of taking pictures has a two fold condition that may be in opposition to the camera being on the smart phone. First of all, for about 20 years at least, I have seen picture taking on the level to where one would take pictures during the day to be on the conference table that night so actions could be planned for the tomorrow. In the 35 mm days, that was possible but could be quite expensive but with the event of digital, it became quite simple and cheap! If that picture taking has to go through e mail, however, it is no longer quite so simple nor quite so cheap. Secondly, when one's concept of picture taking involves taking hundreds of pictures in a day, adding such a cost to getting one's pictures seems impractical.
Thank you for such support, but I think my picture taking lies in other directions.
With the SE you can just email the pics to yourself and they'd be in your inbox when you next get your mail. At least that's how I do it, using Mail which stores everything on my hard drive. I can't see that this costs any money at all other than whatever I already pay for my internet connection.
Well anyway, I was trying to encourage you that the SE is a good reliable product. I hope you will be satisfied with your purchase.
With the SE you can just email the pics to yourself and they'd be in your inbox when you next get your mail. At least that's how I do it, using Mail which stores everything on my hard drive. I can't see that this costs any money at all other than whatever I already pay for my internet connection.....
Well, that is the point. I am not paying for an Internet connection, I don't have a data plan.
While it might seem like quite a waste for all the SE's capability, I am just using it for talk and text. That is what this thread is about, to be able to make phone calls out in the country.........which comes to a certain point (might have covered it in my blog).
When I was talking to T-Mobile about getting a booster, they told me that the problem probably wasn't that they didn't have coverage out there, but rather that my Razr, a 2G device, was insufficient to connect adequately with their 4G network.
The thing is that up to last week, I thought 4G was just some advertising slogan. I did not know that 4G was like C3. I believe this led to a vital communication flaw between myself and others. I believe everyone else just saw it as a factor everyone knew so it wasn't necessary to touch on it, I didn't know about it at all, and we were all missing a key component and therefore, probably the answer, to the problem.
As it is, I've used the SE to talk to my brother here at my in town "cell tower dead zone". He came through very faint, even at full volume, but clear and strong, on the first try. The faintness might have been that I was just holding the phone wrong.
Finally, I have moved out to the country for other reasons but it does seem a little bit counter productive to insist to take all the modern city "technology" with it.
At slightly off the topic, one of the things I am "looking forward to" is to be less Internet linked out at the ranch, away from work. I'll admit it, I'm prone for Net or computer or VR reality addiction. I have been since about 1979. In this century alone, I cringe at the days I have just absolutely blown being on the computer, chasing "attention".
I am hoping that out in the country, I will be less linked. I am going to have satellite internet but I don't know how good that will be in comparison to cable. One link to the Net I don't want to have and I am not currently signing up for is to have it on my phone. I have done 12 years (that's how long I've been signed up with T-Mobile) with just talk and then text (wasn't my original plan but others do it) and I don't have any desire to change that.
I am rather picturing, be it a fantasy or not, my ranch house like that in Skippy the Kangaroo, communications wise. Not necessarily with the exact tools but where those tools fit with the rest of the world. TV by canned (tape, DVD) resources and not a thousand different channels. A landline. Weather and shortwave radio. Yes, satellite internet but in a way, that is rather like the radio in Skippy as in the only way to do things since the other ways such as cable don't exist out there.
The Spectrum (successor to Time Warner) salespeople (phone, door to door) have been rather disappointed that our conversations have been so short because they don't have lines out where I will be living.
That is how I picture "modern city technology"..........what is your definition?
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