Phone and Internet in the MIDDLE OF NOWHERE across Canada, the US, and Mexico

What are the best phone and internet options for snowbirds heading south? The possibilities seem endless and frankly can get kind of confusing. We're going to show you the options we looked at and share our solutions for staying connected while traveling across Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. The traditional option for traveling to another country is a roaming plan. This lets you keep your existing phone number and roam to another country, but is pretty often expensive. Yeah, the major carriers in Canada charge up to $12 a day on top of your existing plan, so you can end up paying several hundred dollars a month for service outside your country. If you do your research, you can find some better deals. They're not well advertised, but Telus and Bell both have Canada-U.S. plans that give you phone service and 50 gigs of data that you can use in either country for $105 a month. This is a great simple option if you're only going to these two countries, and it's the plan we used last year in California and Arizona. But what if that still seems too expensive or your travel plans include Mexico? Well, then you might want to look into IP-based communication. What's that, you ask? IP just stands for Internet Protocol, so it just means communication over the internet. Traditional phone companies transmit voice and text messages on a separate channel from their internet traffic, and they price their plans based on the maximum talk time minutes that you use. IP-based communications, on the other hand, are routed over the internet, which means that it doesn't use any talk time, but instead uses the data network. The major benefit is that it works over Wi-Fi, so even if you're somewhere without a cell signal, you can still communicate using an internet connection. We'll get to this later. The one downside is that it shares the same channel as email, web, and video streaming services, so quality can be affected by network capacity and how much other people are downloading at that time. IP voice communication apps include WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Signal, and many more. IP video options include Zoom, FaceTime, Skype, and others. These apps let you communicate over the internet with people that have the same app, but what if you want an actual phone number? One option to get a phone number that you can use on the internet is something called VoIP, or voice over IP. There are hundreds of different providers out there, and you can get service for as little as a dollar a month. The downside to these services is that they require some technical knowledge to set up, and although the voice service works well, sending and receiving text messages is sometimes unreliable. After much research, I finally found a better option, and interestingly, it's a company based in my hometown of Waterloo, Canada called PhoneGo. They provide a VoIP solution that's easy to set up and free for the basic version. The free version includes a Canadian phone number, unlimited calls to and from other Canadian numbers, voicemail, and caller ID. If you want to add texting, it costs about $3 a month or $18 for the whole year. You can also purchase credits for international calling. And if you don't want a new phone number, you can transfer your existing phone number to PhoneGo for $25. We were both able to transfer our numbers over, and I've been using the service for several months now without any major problems. The only hitch is that it will drop a call when you're switching between Wi-Fi and mobile data. So if you're in your house talking to someone and start walking down the street, the call will drop once you're out of range of your Wi-Fi. That's a bit of a pain, but it doesn't happen that often. So you just need to just call the person back. Okay, now that you have an IP-based phone service, how are you going to get internet on the go? Thankfully, these days, Wi-Fi can be found just about everywhere. Stores, restaurants, coffee shops, campgrounds, rest stops, often for free. The quality can vary, but it's usually good enough for voice calls and sending text messages. And if you don't want to rely on finding Wi-Fi hotspots when traveling, you can always buy a local SIM card. These will usually be much cheaper than a roaming plan. And an even cheaper option is what's called a data-only SIM card. This doesn't give you a phone number or calling minutes, just a data plan. Yeah, I came across a plan that's great for our trip this winter. For $30 US a month, you get 20 gigs of high-speed data and then unlimited at reduced speed. And the service works without roaming charges in Canada, the US, and Mexico. Sound too good to be true? Well, it might be. Yeah, so the company is called Phonus. I've been using them for almost a year now, and it's been working fine, but your mileage may vary. It seems they're reselling a wholesale AT&T plan, so the service itself should be very reliable, but we'll let you know how it works once we get to Mexico. And of course, the ultimate internet option for roaming out where there's no cell service is Starlink Internet. It's very expensive, about $200 Canadian a month, and as we found out, it doesn't work if you're surrounded by tall trees. But if you have a clear view of the sky, you get fast, unlimited internet in places where you'd otherwise have no connection at all. For boondocking outside of mobile network range, it's really your only option. So we still do recommend it for digital nomads that need to remain connected for work. But of course, you still need a mobile data solution for the times when you don't have a clear view of the sky. So that's how we plan to stay connected while traveling as snowbirds. An IP-based phone coupled with our Starlink internet that provides a Wi-Fi connection and a data-only SIM card for when Starlink is not deployed. We have yet to test this setup outside of Canada and the U.S., but we'll keep you updated this winter as we cross into Mexico and try our best to stay connected while boondocking our way down the Baja coast. See you then. Is this me? Yep. Am I positioned properly again? Yep. It's really your only option. So we dill... So we dill? It's a big dill. End scene. Make sure you don't miss the next video by liking, subscribing, and turning on notifications. Thanks for joining us and we'll see you in the next one.