I have read some chronicles of full-time RVers from long ago – like way back in the 1980’s – and life for them was indisputably more difficult than it is for us. The RVs were less robust, the leveling systems were primitive, diesel fuel less available. Almost all bills had to be paid by mail and banking, too, had to be done remotely unless you could find a local branch of your bank. But the biggest difference was telephone. Before cell phones, an RVer would have to stop at a truck stop to make a call. If you had a computer with an acoustic modem, you had to find a telephone that you could use long enough to do anything of value. And the internet, still in its infancy, was more of a curiosity than a real tool for getting anything done.
Today we can call anyone we want anytime we want from almost anywhere. Yes, there are still “dead zones” where there is no signal, but they are rare. I have more often been surprised by the high quality of the signal in places where I expected none than finding a poor signal when I expected a good one. Banking is done electronically using a cell phone app. Almost all bills are paid electronically via debit or credit. News, sports and information of all kinds is available via the internet. Social media make it a snap to keep up with friends.
But all of this modern electronic convenience upon which we now depend as full-time RVers requires a cell phone data plan. Bandwidth is money to the cell phone companies and they don’t just give it away. Jett and I have a shared data plan with Verizon that, with equipment charges and taxes, runs about $200 per month. We have to share 24GB of data. That means that we cannot stream anything of any size. Netflix? Forget it – a single movie is several gigabytes. We even have to be careful with social media. There are so many video clips of children, cute cats and dogs and people doing stupid stuff embedded in Facebook postings that, if we aren’t careful, we can use a gigabyte in a day.
A year ago we were averaging about 12GB per month. We are now nearly double that. Are we using the internet more? Possibly, but I don’t think our usage has changed dramatically. What I have seen develop over the past year is an insidious hidden usage of my data bandwidth by websites running in the background of my browser. For example, unless you specifically block it, Windows tries to back stuff up to the “cloud”. That is real data, in big chunks at times. Facebook, if left running in the background, seems to continue to use data (for what I don’t know – maybe those cute cats continue to roll around when I am not looking). There have been times when I have checked my usage in the morning and find that 4GB of data have passed through my router while I was sleeping! I have had to buy “extra data” several times to avoid ridiculous Verizon surcharges.
We tried to train ourselves to shut down our laptops at night. I even tried to routinely shut off the router before bedtime, though wasn’t very successful at that – too tired to remember, I guess. But still the puzzling data drain continued. I finally got sufficiently frustrated that I called Verizon to get some insight into what was using the data. They couldn’t really tell me that; they are, after all, just an internet provider. It would be like asking the city where my water was going; they can only tell me how much water flowed through my meter. But Verizon did offer me a plan with more data for less money. Why didn’t they notify me sooner that such a plan was available? Because they aren’t stupid, I guess. But it was a bit annoying that I had to complain before they ‘fessed up that, yes, there was a better way.
Even with our kinder, gentler data plan we still need to be careful about what we leave running in our browser windows. I believe Facebook and other social media sites suck up data like a black hole. And even portal sites like msn.com consume data at a rate much higher than I would expect. Our current strategy is to close such sites when we are done with them – we try to NEVER leave them running in the background. This strategy has stabilized our data usage, though still at a higher rate than I can explain – about 600MB per day. But that is ok. Because that level of usage fits into our data plan and our data plan makes our RV lifestyle feasible.
Data plan
I have read some chronicles of full-time RVers from long ago – like way back in the 1980’s – and life for them was indisputably more difficult than it is for us. The RVs were less robust, the leveling systems were primitive, diesel fuel less available. Almost all bills had to be paid by mail and banking, too, had to be done remotely unless you could find a local branch of your bank. But the biggest difference was telephone. Before cell phones, an RVer would have to stop at a truck stop to make a call. If you had a computer with an acoustic modem, you had to find a telephone that you could use long enough to do anything of value. And the internet, still in its infancy, was more of a curiosity than a real tool for getting anything done.
Today we can call anyone we want anytime we want from almost anywhere. Yes, there are still “dead zones” where there is no signal, but they are rare. I have more often been surprised by the high quality of the signal in places where I expected none than finding a poor signal when I expected a good one. Banking is done electronically using a cell phone app. Almost all bills are paid electronically via debit or credit. News, sports and information of all kinds is available via the internet. Social media make it a snap to keep up with friends.
But all of this modern electronic convenience upon which we now depend as full-time RVers requires a cell phone data plan. Bandwidth is money to the cell phone companies and they don’t just give it away. Jett and I have a shared data plan with Verizon that, with equipment charges and taxes, runs about $200 per month. We have to share 24GB of data. That means that we cannot stream anything of any size. Netflix? Forget it – a single movie is several gigabytes. We even have to be careful with social media. There are so many video clips of children, cute cats and dogs and people doing stupid stuff embedded in Facebook postings that, if we aren’t careful, we can use a gigabyte in a day.
A year ago we were averaging about 12GB per month. We are now nearly double that. Are we using the internet more? Possibly, but I don’t think our usage has changed dramatically. What I have seen develop over the past year is an insidious hidden usage of my data bandwidth by websites running in the background of my browser. For example, unless you specifically block it, Windows tries to back stuff up to the “cloud”. That is real data, in big chunks at times. Facebook, if left running in the background, seems to continue to use data (for what I don’t know – maybe those cute cats continue to roll around when I am not looking). There have been times when I have checked my usage in the morning and find that 4GB of data have passed through my router while I was sleeping! I have had to buy “extra data” several times to avoid ridiculous Verizon surcharges.
We tried to train ourselves to shut down our laptops at night. I even tried to routinely shut off the router before bedtime, though wasn’t very successful at that – too tired to remember, I guess. But still the puzzling data drain continued. I finally got sufficiently frustrated that I called Verizon to get some insight into what was using the data. They couldn’t really tell me that; they are, after all, just an internet provider. It would be like asking the city where my water was going; they can only tell me how much water flowed through my meter. But Verizon did offer me a plan with more data for less money. Why didn’t they notify me sooner that such a plan was available? Because they aren’t stupid, I guess. But it was a bit annoying that I had to complain before they ‘fessed up that, yes, there was a better way.
Even with our kinder, gentler data plan we still need to be careful about what we leave running in our browser windows. I believe Facebook and other social media sites suck up data like a black hole. And even portal sites like msn.com consume data at a rate much higher than I would expect. Our current strategy is to close such sites when we are done with them – we try to NEVER leave them running in the background. This strategy has stabilized our data usage, though still at a higher rate than I can explain – about 600MB per day. But that is ok. Because that level of usage fits into our data plan and our data plan makes our RV lifestyle feasible.
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