If you are staying at a resort or motel for a while, or just having a "luxury break" from camping for a night or two, you may wish to go online via the provided fixed phone line.
If so you need to watch out for two snags.
1. Do you have a local access number ?
If you are somewhere in the outback your service provider may not have a local access points for you to phone into. This may mean paying for a timed long distance call.
Therefore, before you leave home, download a list of all local access point of your service provider. Access via Telstra Bigpond is in this regard very good, as with one universal number you have local access from any place in Australia.
2. Dialling for an Outside line
On the phones in many motels and resort rooms one usually has to dial a single digit number first (usually an '0' or a '9') to get access to an outside line.
You therefore need to type this number (shown in red) at the front of your normal entry number.
For example : 0 8999 0011
On some motel switch boards there is a short time delay after the 0 has been received before the outside line is connected.
As a result the laptop modem may already be partly through the rest of the access number (899..) before the outside line is available.
The result is a malfunction of the connection.
This happened to me while staying at a resort on the Gold Coast (in SE Queensland).
I tried and tried and just could not get connected. Finally I decided to get hold of the resort manager and he initiated me into the simple procedure to follow.
To overcome the problem type one or more commas ( , ) between the first digit (outside line request digit) and the actual access number, like this
