internet access

G'day,
In WA at any rate, most of the country towns have telecentres, where you can access the internet for very reasonable rates. I'm not sure about other states, or other towns, but Broome and Exmouth have telecentres, and I've been using my local one near perth, and it costs me $1 per 15 minutes internet access. This is way cheaper than sat. phone, and if you have your email set up so you can access it from anywhere, its probably hte best way to go.
Hope this helps. Cheers, Alex.

David a word of warning about using a public computer for internet banking. Keyboard sniffers can be installed on the computer for someone to read later and get all your passwords. The banks state this in their security policy so be careful with internet banking on the road and make some other arrangements. As for Email use a public email address e.g Hotmail, yahoo and link it to your Email accounts so your main Email address and password is not used.

Well most towns have mobile coverage now, we use our mobile phone connected to our laptop, and where there is no mobile coverage we usually get use of a landline (we offer a generous fee to more than cover ph cost) from somewhere or wait till we're back in mobile coverage again..

this is just a cheap suggestion that does wor if you have a laptop and mobile (and the money to pay for the mobile bill). If you buy an expensive inverter you can run the laptop off the bar battery. If you have blown your money on mobile phone, laptop and allocated balance to bill rageable mobile bills, buy a cheap $64 dollar 70W inverter (or less) and, don't use it to run the laptop as the sine wave is the wrong shape, but just use it to re-charge the laptop off the 240V adaptor when driving.

...and also if you do the latop thing get Outlook or similar email program so you can write your emails ... and then hook up to the internet and send and log off. Save lots of $ than hooking up to the internet and then typing out long wine induced emails and then sending.

David, just for emailing I use a Pocketmail device which is like a slightly larger than usual organiser with a full keyboard and display screen. I type emails into my outbox, take the device to a phone (public phones are everywhere, even in the outback) then with a local 1300 call I send and receive with the one call. It means that my email address is .....@pocketmail.com.au, and I cannot access the internet from it, but certainly the cheap and simple answer to keeping in touch via email. These pocketmail composers are available from most large post offices.