Communication - phone and internet access from anywhere in the USA. One of the great problems for the modern sundog is how to get plugged in.

The internet has become a necessary and incredible resource that most people cannot give up once they have started using it. The options right now that are at all practical are:
1. cell phone connection to your ISP with a free long distance plan, digital connection and a card to connect your computer to the cell phone. There are variations from this but the speeds you'll achieve will be about 19.2K baud at best compared to 50K baud on your dialup at home. This is only practical where you have a good signal from your cell provider. Verizon is popular for this and what I'm using now. T-Mobile was pretty useless with weak signal (GSM) and service only in the cities.

2. Satellite Up and Down. Two way satellite - Direct PC. Many people are trying this. Installation is difficult and pickier than Satellite TV. You can get third party installations that seek the satellite for you and find it without about 45 seconds. Seems like I keep reading $5000 or more for this type of setup, but it is fast for downloading, not so good for FTP and terrible at games because every click of your mouse goes up 22 thousand miles and back down to the internet. Substantial delay - 1/2 second or so.

3. WiFi - Wide Spectrum High Fidelity - This is a card that goes in your laptop or PC and serves as a radio to connect you wirelessly to some "node" - which would be within a 1/4 mile or so of you. Many places have the base transceiver installed and you can "join" the network just by being in range. They call these "hotspots". This is not wide spread yet, showing up now in Starbucks, and in some trailer parks. The connection is only as good as the number of users versus the speed of connection to the internet. Meaning - the receiver has to have a connection to a computer that is attached to a fast internet connection - like a T1 or DSL or a cable modem. Doesn't do much good to share a 19.2K baud connection among several people. In some towns WiFi (pronounced why-fie) is big covering a whole town. This shows a little promise for a fulltiming sundog, but until it is widespread and even then, it would have to be a free or cheap connection, I'm not interested. Some to the trailer parks getting involved are charging 5 or 6 bucks/night to use it. That is pretty expensive internet. Too rich for me.
However with Dell and Intel pushing the Centrino chip on all laptops now - which is a WiFi chip on the motherboard - you don't have to buy the card - we'll see college students and campuses flocking to this solution so we might see cheap WiFi networks expanding - connecting free hotspots around the country. Soon it may be cheap enough to actually buy a new laptop with Centrino, or for me to add a good WiFi card for those times I do find a free connection.

For most people the internet can be broken down into two functions, email and looking for information. Email can be done over slow connections and even when someone is spamming you and sending you huge files, you can configure your email program to reject those and not be burdened too much.

I use the Verizon dialup when the trailer is on the road and all my work gets done fine. The internet service is slow, but Ositech has an Accelerator service which makes it bearable.

I expect things only to get better and better for the fulltimer. As this occurs I expect more and more people to throw off the shackles and hit the road.