How I Chose My Providers and Rate Plans

We spend our summer months sailing in the beautiful protected waters of the Gulf of Georgia in British Columbia, Canada. We keep our boat, Serenade, in the sheltered harbor of Nanaimo on the east coast of Vancouver Island (which forms one big breakwater on the Pacific Ocean).

Thus we are centrally located between the Discovery Islands to the north and the Gulf Islands to the south, with the San Juan Islands across the border at the entrance to Puget Sound, near Seattle, with a very large cruising area at hand.

We need to keep in touch at all times, and the challenge is to maintain internet and voice communications while traveling through the hundreds of islands and many coastal inlets that are characteristic of this area.

Since we are sailing mostly in the Canadian side, I had already experienced various Canadian cellphone providers such as Telus and Rogers. A few years ago, I had closed my analog cellphone account due to some bad experiences with Telus, regarding over-billing errors, system failures, and staff attitude problems.

I adopted the Rogers GSM system to replace the Telus account, and I was reasonably happy with the service quality and coverage, although I also experienced over-billing problems, false roaming charges and huge bills when actually roaming. It pays to watch your bill very closely with any of these providers as their systems are far from flawless.

Note: I'm jumping ahead somewhat, but this is worth noting: Bell has a great system on the net that lets you see your 'unbilled usage' so you can stop any activity ahead of time that could result in a big bill the following month.

This year I had decided I wanted more than a single carrier, just so I had maximum communications coverage during our travels. I was using an unlocked version of the predecessor to the HTC Touch (HTC TyTn) on the Rogers GSM system, and I started to look around for an additional provider on the CDMA networks.

NEXT: Cellphone Networks - GSM vs CDMA