Carliving.info - Free information about living in cars, vans and campervans.

Having a phone where you are contactable will greatly improve your chances of getting a job and not having to live in your car or a van. Another good thing about having a mobile phone is that these days it should not cost you much to buy or run. Fortunately in Australia we have the wonderful pre-paid phone option. I checked out a number of options before settling on the Vodaphone prepaid package. I found this rather amusing as I actually work for a major telecommunications company and the packages they offered were pretty shit. Whatever package you choose there are some things you will want to seek in the plan.

Tailor it to your needs. If you make lots of calls then you will want a cheap call rate. If you hardly make any calls then you will need to ensure that you don't loose your money at the end of time periods. You should never have to pay for incoming calls. If possible get a plan that allows roll over of un used call costs into your next time period. Be very wary of contracts or plans that lock you in and will cost you a lot of money in the long run. Telephone service providers must provide you with a minimum plan cost upon you requesting it. It is illegal not to. So request acomplete minimum plan cost in writing. If they refuse to provide one, go elsewhere. If you can, buy your phone up front. You don't need bells and whistles. I ended up buying a phone that has a camera and colour screen for just over $130 and I have only used the camera once or twice.

I ended up choosing a plan that allowed me to top up my calls as little as once a year, with a reasonable rate for the calls but no roll over of calls. This suits me because I hardly ever make any calls, I communicate with many of my friends via the Internet.

I now have a second mobile phone that stays in the van, permantly plugged into a car charger that can be used to track the van if it gets stolen. This phone and the charger cost me just $20 second hand. It is an older, no fantastic fetures phone which was mass produced and in its day was top of the line. The pre-paid plan and sim card for this phone cost just $10 from Vodapone. I expect that Telstra, Optus and others would have similar plans.

Voice mail boxes.

This is not as readily available in Australia as in the United States. You can rent a voice mail box which has a phone number allocated to it. It works much the same way in theory as an answering machine. People call in, receive a recorded message and are invited to leave a message. There is nothing stopping you from saying "I'm not at home at the moment, please leave a message after the tone or call me on my mobile on .." Most people will not be the wiser that you you don't have a home. You can dial in, dial a special code and retrieve your messages. In Australia, Telstra, the national phone company offers a service called Message Bank which does this. I've never used it, so you should look in to it for yourself

Email.

Email rocks! There are so many providers of free email that you should have lots of choice as to which one you prefer to sign up with. You can access your email at almost every public library in Australia now as well as a large number of Internet cafes, Internet Kiosks and some train stations and airports. You can usually send and receive emails, attachments such as pictures and other things. The only cautionary note I have about email is that it is like a post card. Every server it passes through can read it and make a copy of it. So email is not so great for confidential messages. Though you can buy email programs that will encrypt the email for you. If you are living in a car or van though the odds are on that an Internet cafe or library will not let you install such programs on their computers. Also worth noting, many free email suppliers have adds in their Internet interface. Some have programs that scan your email messages for key words and serve you adds based on those key words. So your email is not confidential.

Wifi, free wireless Internet

This is something you can forget about unless you live in the US, England, Europe or a major Australian city. I was keen to give this a try, searching for free Internet access points. The problem is, in Australia there just is not many free Internet Access points. Certainly not many legal ones. Sure, there are some unsecured Internet Access Points out there but most people are cluey enough to secure their Access Points. Even if you do find an unsecured Access Point you won't be able to access the Internet from all of them.

As an experiment I drove around my town over a period of two weeks mapping Internet Access points. This is a process called wardriving - I have a tutoroial on how wardrive here. Of the more than 400 access points I found in a town with a population of 33,000 about 70% of them were secure, and encrypted. Of the 30% which were not secure, only on two of those was I able to bring up the Internet. One of those two turned out to belong to a coworker so I instructed him on how to secure it. Now that's the best I managed using over three hundred dollars worth of high gain antennas and Wifi interface cards.

I would recommend an alternative. Buy a simple and cheaper USB Wifi dongle and plug that in to your computer. Sign up for a Telstra wireless Internet account. Drive to a McDonalds and use the Internet there. You will get good signal strength, it is reasonably cheap and perfectly legal. Or find and access free wireless internet at cafe's etc.

Wireless Internet

A new trend in Australia is wireless Internet. I have not done much research on it simply because it would be expensive to try each company out. Sadly the companies I checked out also tie you into contracts. Telstra's minimum term is 24 months. This seems to be the current standard practice. Also, although coverage is increasing you will not get Internet Access everywhere. Having said that, new wireless Internet seems to offer broadband speed wireless Internet, with reasonable coverage and without the cost of line rental. Set up costs include the wireless modem though. Some of the smaller wireless Internet companies may have coverage that only covers a single city, or a few cities. Rural areas may have no access to this service.

Post office boxes.

For mail while living in a car or van a post office box is useful. In Australia you need to have a fixed address to apply for a post office box. This makes it hard to get a hold of one if you have no fixed address. If you can arrange for some one to allow you to use a fixed address temporarily then you can get hold of a post office box.

You can also get mail sent to you care of a post office. If you pop in regularly you will get your mail. However you should check with your local post office about this. Having worked in a post office I know that some of the postal workers will just mark such mail as return to sender rather than dealing with the 'hassel' of having to record it and process it.