USA Canada Alaska Wifi and cell phone

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JX2Fields

JX2Fields

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Joined
Nov 29, 2014
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59
Location
northern California
My wife an I are in the planning stages of a road trip from Northern California to Alaska  and back. My wife still works part time so needs secure wifi and cell coverage, not all the time but every other day or so.  I have Verizon and her work has ATT.  Any comments or suggestions on which to use and your experience.  Seems global packages for both run about the same $$.
 
Coverage is likely to be spotty along that route, regardless of the package you choose. There is a lot of empty territory, and cell towers may be few and far between. I haven't traveled that region for several years now, so hopefully somebody with current experience will respond.

What route will you use through Canada, e.g. Cassiar Hwy, and what parts of Alaska will you visit? It's a huge area, Alaska alone is 3x the size of Texas and  BC + Yukon adds a bunch more. You may get better advice if you can narrow it down a bit!
 
When I went up last year - I have Verizon and had service almost everywhere in ALASKA - but in Canada it was very spotty, but was able to stop at McDonalds or other places with WiFi to get email etc.

My cellular hotspot never once got a decent signal in Canada - so luckily I avoided the international charges. Hotspot worked great in quite a few places in Alaska.

Not sure how ATT would act, maybe someone else will chime in.

Good Luck it is a fantastic trip - take your time and enjoy,

Jim
 
ATT is decent along the major roads.  Gets spotty when going through the mountains and hills.    Get off the beaten path and it will drop.

ACS and GCI are the major carriers in Alaska.  ATT piggy-backs off of them in areas they don't have coverage.    ACS and GCI is in the process of combining their services as they merged the cellular.  It is still a transition thing though.

http://www.adn.com/article/gci-acs-combine-cellular-networks-shoring-against-verizon

Verizon has the major roads and cities covered pretty good, but I've not heard much about the coverage from the boarder to Fairbanks.  I know just before Delta, the only coverage is ACS/GCI.  At least, 2 years ago.

It should be noted that the data speed will be highly variable depending on the tower and location.  Some of the towers only have a T1 line or Microwave backbone going to them.  And, very limited amount, mostly in Cities, have been upgraded to 4G or higher for cellular.
 
This summer we traveled the same route using Verizon in the US including Canada with very good coverage. While we found areas while traveling that had no coverage in AK we hover age in every town we were on, much of the data 3G instead of 4G.


I bought a Koodo prepaid SIM card for my Samsung 5g that had minutes, text, and data. Koodo is a subsidiary of Telescope and had reasonable voice and data coverage for the Canadian portion of our trip. When you are on the roads of the Northern Yukon Territory do not expect much coverage but when in most established communities like Dawson City you will have good coverage.
 
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