One of the most popular subjects on internet forums, is the cost of the internet itself. I follow a lot of caravaning and camping pages and I notice that there are daily questions about mobile phone and data services. It's a bit of a Lion's den, given that everyone's needs are different and there are hundreds of options available.
One of the most commonly espoused opinions is that you "have to be with Telstra, if you are travelling." I've bought into that for years and there is indeed a degree of truth to it. Telstra coverage in regional ares is undeniably superior to their competitors. Network roaming was on the horizon more than ten years ago. That would have meant that people who were with other carriers could have made calls on the Telstra network, in areas where their carrier didn't have coverage. Vodafone and Optus were very keen, but Telstra did whatever they could to block network roaming and increase their regional monopoly.
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| Mobile broadband modem in it's specially designed porthole |
In may 2017, the ACCC ruled that Telstra weren't maintaining a monopoly and decided to support their stance. Interestingly over 95% of Australians live in cities where Telstra's competition offer very acceptable coverage. Telstra's monopoly in the bush isn't enough to give them an overall monopoly. Their hold on the Australian mobile phone and broadband market is loosening rapidly, largely due to high data costs and dissatisfaction with customer service . It'll be interesting to see what Telstra do with their regional monopoly as their urban market fails. It's hardly worth them maintaining it, but they're bound by a commitment to provide coverage to a nominal percentage of the population. I predict that Telstra will eventually become just a mobile network facilitator, not a telco as such. They're bandwidth and coverage will become available to any telco that's happy to pay a fee. It's an optimistic prediction, but despite dropping charges dramatically, the rot has set in and the mass exodus from Telstra has begun. It's going to take more than reduced data charges to save their monopoly.
Whatever the future of coverage in Australia might hold, I do indeed have a mobile contracted to Telstra and the coverage is excellent. For the time being I'll keep it with Telstra for that reason. Even so, I feel that I'm being ripped off by the contract I'm locked into. I re-contracted a year ago. My contract costs $75 per month with unlimited national landline and mobile calls and certain international calls. My data allowance is a tiny 3Gb per month with excess data charged at a huge $10 per Gb. To make a simple comparison; with mobile data costing as little as 70c per Gb, $10 per Gb is the equivalent of paying $22 for a can of Watties Baked Beans!
Within a year of me entering my contract, the same call quota plus 12Gb of data was being charged at $50. After about 2 weeks of "sport whinging" to the Telstra Contract Retention Team, I managed to get 10 bucks a month knocked off my contract fee and a total of 8Gb of data, but still "not happy Jan!"
We home educate our daughter and like most teenagers, she loves to stream video online. Why wouldn't she. The internet is important to us. I know that statement is often maligned by the neo-Luddite types who see the "interwebs" as the root of all evil, but it's the way the world works these days. You're looking at it now. Telstra's data charges just can't work for us.
Following a few experiments, we ended up using Optus as our main internet provider. On their month by month post-paid My Mobile Broadband Plus 100 package, we get 100Gb per month for $70. It's a hell of a lot of money on top of my $65 per month with Telstra for phone, but I can't get out of that. As soon as I can, I'll switch to a pre-paid service on the Telstra network for phone, that should cost me around $30 per month, with a little bit of data for maps, social media and Wikicamps for when we're travelling.
Optus coverage can be patchy, but it's fairly ok in most small urban areas. We just have to accept that we won't be streaming from Netflix when we're in remote areas. Somehow, I don't necessarily think that's such a bad thing. I still have 8Gb a month with Telstra for internet essentials, such as educational resources for our daughter, when we're off the beaten track. On the flip side, one massive benefit to our Optus package is that as well as 100Gb, certain types of streaming are un-metered. We can stream unlimited data from Netflix and music from spotify, without using up our data allowance.
It's a BYO modem deal, but mobile broadband modems are cheap. I bought a fairly decent unlocked 4G modem from ebay for $45. One thing to note, is that if you do get into a deal with un-metered streaming such as Netflix, DO NOT stream via Chrome. Stream directly from the app. Anything streamed from via chrome will simply be metered as a Chrome download. That's a bit of a trap for young players: and old ones like me who only discovered that when I noticed my daughter was clocking up 7Gb per day.
There are many, many options for streaming movies and TV shows. You can use a smart TV, Google home, Chrome Cast from a device, a device connected via a HDMI cable, in fact far too many methods to even attempt to list. I'm going to provide an outline of our setup, but I'm by no means saying that it's the best option. It just happens to be very cost effective.
We have a Kogan 24" full HD LCD / LED TV with a built in DVD player that we rarely use. It's mounted on a flexible arm on a bulkhead facing our lounge area. These particular TV sets cost around $200. They're lightweight and the picture is very good for the price in my opinion. As far as audio goes, they are essentially un-listenable. The speakers are of ridiculously low quality, under powered and housed in a space that prevents reproduction much below 400Hz. They are fucking dreadful! Fortunately that is very easily and cheaply remedied. More about that later.
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| Apple TV - A cost effective way to make a cheap TV "smart" |
About five years ago, when we lived in a house, we bought one of the second generation Apple TV streaming boxes for $100. We used it about 5 times to stream via iTunes, but found it very expensive. The upside is that there are a number of streaming channel options on Apple TV, including Netflix, Stan, Youtube and hundreds of internet radio stations. It's a tiny unit and has sat in the caravan, unused for some years. When we finally got onto a decent mobile broadband deal with un-metered Netflix streaming, I looked at spending $80 on Chrome cast, enabling me to connect form my computer to the TV wirelessly. Then I remembered the Apple TV box. I attached it to the back of the TV with velcro pads, connected it to WIFI, plugged it in with a HDMI cable, updated it to the latest software version for free and hey presto, we had a smart TV with streaming available with the click of a remote. As I've already stated, there are many many options. This was the one we opted for because we happened to have the hardware stashed away in the caravan. However, with second generation Apple TV units available from the US on ebay for as little as $50, it's not a bad one.
Listening
As someone who spent the first 25 years of their working life as a recording engineer in the television and music industries, I take listening very seriously. I can't bloody stand poor audio reproduction. I can accept that a caravan is hardly the best environment in terms of acoustics, but I do what I can to make whatever improvements that are possible within my budget, which is three fifths of fuck all.
I walked into JB Hifi with around 400 bucks to burn on a Bluetooth speaker system. I admit that Bluetooth audio is somewhat of a compromise, but I tend to listen to WAV files that I've burned from my CD collection, which even via Bluetooth, sound better than MP3s via a cable, in my opinion. Bluetooth is also an improving technology and later generation codecs, for instance apt-X offer much better audio quality than the early Bluetooth headphones that were rather nasty.
Bluetooth compression aside, everything I listened to with a price tag below $400, sounded like a bucket of sick! The speaker quality in the units that I heard was invariably dreadful. There was absolutely no way I was going to part with my dough. Some of them weren't even stereo units for over $300. On the way home, I dropped into my favourite geek Mecca, MSY Technologies to buy an SD card. I saw Creative Labs Inspire 3300 active 2.1 (left, right and subwoofer) computer speaker system for $59. I thought it couldn't possibly be any worse than any of the units that had just auditioned, so I bought it out of disgust.
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| Kogan TV with very expensive speakers |
I got it home, plugged my PC into it and cranked it up. I had to call my wife to ensure me that I wasn't experiencing auditory hallucinations in some kind of flashback from my very misguided youth. It sounded absolutely fantastic and it had just cost me sixty bucks!! Creative Labs isn't just some logo stuck onto nasty OEM manufactured products. They're a Singapore based technology company that make some pretty clever stuff. They've been around for years and were the developers of the highly successful Sound Blaster PC sound card. It's a mystery how and why they manufacturer such great products for so little. The build quality is pretty cheap, but the audio quality is outstanding
The subwoofer, which is also the amplifier and power supply, fits perfectly on a shelf behind a thin plywood bulkhead, which also acts as a very effective low frequency resonator. The sub has a separate level control, so one can prevent it from being overpowering in a small space. Unlike many 2.1 computer speaker system, the crossover point between the left / right speakers and sub is very well placed. The very compact LR speakers have an effective low frequency port system and go down relatively low, preventing that notorious void between the 2 and the .1 in budget systems. They sound fantastic!
I set about making a flat bar that fits to the back of the TV support arm with the speakers mounted on it, either side of the screen. It works very well. I ran a cable from the TV's audio out, into the amplifier and instantly transformed the worst sounding TV I've ever heard, into one of the best. In fact the audio graphic equaliser on the Kogan TV is quite good. It's just the speakers that are totally shit! My next addition was a Bluetooth receiver, so that I could wirelessly connect music from my devices. It's a very small box that cost me $29 from MSY and fixes with a velcro pad to the amplifier. I really didn't want to have to connect and disconnect cables when swapping between TV and audio from devices, so I bought a little passive router switch with gold plated RCA contacts for $18 from ebay. I have also attached that to the side of the amplifier with velcro. The amp / subwoofer stands on small feet. These have proven invaluable as i have been able to wind all excess cable around them and secure them tightly with small cable tires. Any cables that run between the speakers, TV, router / amplifier, do so via a single flexible conduit. It's all very tidy.
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| The audio nerve centre |
Nobody, even those with very grand caravans, has ever walked into our home and not been impressed with the AV set up. The system consists of 4G modem $45, TV $200, Apple TV $50, 2.1 Sound System $60, Bluetooth Receiver $30, Router $18 and a few cables $30. That's about $430.
This stuff can be done very cheaply and very easily. The trick is not to get sucked into marketing. Cheap technology can be really nasty, but as I learned from my trip to JB Hifi, big names and big price tags, don't necessarily mean quality.
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