It seems that there are very few places where you can go today where you do not see people with mobile phones. The first mobile phones were huge and you had to have the bag to put them in and a charging schedule that took an engineering degree to understand. Today the phones are so small that people can wear them in their ears or stick them in any size pocket. Charging them is as simple as putting a cord into an outlet. Today you can not only use your phone to talk you can text message, take pictures and be connected to the internet. On the newer models you can watch television programming.

My husband I were feeling out of the loop when it came to mobile phone use. No matter which company we would talk to the area where we lived had a white no service circle by it. We live on the south shores of a very large lake. The town to the north of us that has a large transmitter did not cover us and the town to the north of us the transmitter was blocked by a huge hill. We could use or phones away from our house, but we could not use them in the house or in our yard. Then one company installed a digital satellite system on the water tower of the town ten miles east of our house. This is a vast improvement. With the digital satellite system we are able to use our telephone where ever we want. We are now able to participate in many of the great free long distance plans that many of the companies offer.

The call charges have also greatly reduced. It used to be that you had to be very mindful of what area you were in so that the call would not cost a huge amount of money. I remember a friend of ours calling his wife and kids every night during a hunting trip he was on in the western part of the United States. When he got the bill for the calls it was hundreds of dollars. He did not realize that his plan did not cover the state he was in and that the roaming costs where so high. He had been helping his son with math homework over the phone and even listened to his daughter play a new song she learned on the piano. The entire time the costs were adding up at an alarming rate. The new digital satellite system and other cellular towers are now often put up by several different service providers so you can utilize the signal with out having to pay extra for it.