How to get Wi-Fi on the road.   

It is great to have a internet phone but you need access to the internet! In the US more and more coffee shops offer free WiFi. Starbuck, McDonald, Fedex and others offer you free Wi-Fi if AT&T is your cell phone provider.

Get an antenna to boost your signal. 

If you are travelling with an RV or sailing your boat, you can install an antennas to boost the Wi-Fi signal. They claim a 10 mile range or more. There is 2 kinds of system. The first one connects to your computer USB and the second system connect to an ethernet router. The first solution is cheaper but the second solution could be connected to a router and will allow multiple computers to connect to the network.

What is a Mi-Fi? 

A Mi-Fi is a router which is connected to the internet via 3G or 4G like your cell phone. 3G is slow and may not work very well with an internet phone. 4G is fast but not available yet everywhere and is more expensive. AT&T, Verizon, Virgin, Sprint, Tmobile and True Connect sell a Mi-Fi.

Faxes 

 Do you still have a fax connected to a phone line? You receive maybe 10 faxes or less a year. How does each fax cost you? A lot of money. For more than 10 years, I had an efax number and was payng about $150 per year. Great service! They would email you the faxes. This was working for me. Last year I received less than 10 faxes which mean I paid $15 to receive these faxes. This was a bit expensive. I found a free service and I am trying it now. I will let you know how it works. The only down side is that you the fax number is a Washinghton state number. This is no big deal for me. The service is called: http://www.k7.net. I use this service only to receive faxes and kept my old fax machine to send faxes. Make sure your reprogram your fax to print your new fax number on the outbound faxes.

Cut your phone bill to ZERO

Speaking with a friend the other day on a sailing boat, I realized that I was still paying more than $35 a month to receive a couple of phone calls a day. I googled a few questions and discovered a new little box. The Obitalk box allow you to receive Google Voice on your home phone.

What is Google Voice?
If you have a Gmail account, you can sign up for a free Google Voice (GV) Account. Google will give you a phone number and allow you to forward this number to your cell phone or your computer and replace your cell phone voicemail with the GV voice mail. which does a lot more than your regular voicemail. It could translate the voice message into text and send it to you as an email or as a sms. That is already pretty good!

Now what does this Obitalk box do?
You plug the box to the internet and to your phone, enter your email and password in the very easy Obi software and voila! You have a new phone line at home. The Obi100 and Obi101 can receive 2 GV lines or two SIP lines or any combination of GV and SIP lines, the Obi202 receives 4.