Phones on the Road

For on the road telephone service there are now several options. Regular readers of these pages already know we include details of which phone services work in the area of campsites we review. We do this because mobile phone coverage in Australia is extremely poor compared with places such as the UK and Ireland etc. where it is almost 100%. In fact mobile phones only cover a very tiny 7% of the land mass.
Whilst the original Digital service called GSM works well in populated areas is is pretty useless as soon as you get into the "bush". The old Analogue service has been replaced with CDMA. This is a new kind of digital service which is being deployed in both the city and the country and supposedly offers the best of both worlds. We believed the "hype" and bought one only to find that areas previously covered by our old Analogue now had no signal. So we have no recommendations on this subject, but we do hope it will improve.

Satellite phones are still far too expensive both to buy and to use for the average caravanner on a tight budget. On the other hand they do provide the ultimate in coverage, almost everywhere in Australia. New services such as Iridium and Globalstar are helping to reduce costs and we can only live in hope that one day this will be a mass product at low cost. There is some more info on this page further down under Communication.
An excellent way of keeping in touch whilst touring is to use Message Bank. This usually costs a token fee per month depending on your service provider. How it works - it is really just a remote answering machine. If you don't answer a call because you are out of range etc. a recorded message invites you to leave a message. When you get into range again your phone either "beeps" you or displays a symbol indicating that you have a message. You simply dial a special number and retrieve your messages. The cost of retrieving your messages is generally classed as a call. Our recommendation is regardless of whatever other measures you have in place it makes very good sense to have this feature activated.