Dial Up Connection Away From Home

[AlanHo]

One of my friends has got a job as a residential nurse and carer - looking after handicapped and seriously ill patients in their homes. This means that she will travel around the country, staying in peoples homes for varying periods.

She uses a laptop to communicate with her employers and the outside world in general and has asked me how best to use it at different locations. It has an AOL dial-up connection currently dedicated to her home phone line.

So the question is - and I am sure it is a dumb one - can she (with permission & recompense of cost) use other residential phone lines at local telephone costs to connect with AOL.

If so - how - and does she need to make any changes to the computer settings along the way...?

It is so long since I have used dial up I have quite forgotten how it all works. I use a wireless laptop when away from home connecting at hotels or Starbucks etc as necessary - but her laptop is quite old and she lacks this facility.

[ithonicfury]

She would need to dial in to a local number, when she goes to connect to AOL, but before actually connecting there should be some button or option to look for access numbers.

Click that and it will dial in to aols servers to look for local numbers (that one is toll free so you dont have to worry about racking up charges while you just look for numbers to call).

Then just follow the prompts to look for a local number (i think AOL has something about this on their site somewhere, maybe in a faq or on their support page, but not exactly sure where).

Then once you have the number in there you can sign in.

[catgate]

I would have expected that she should just be able to dial the number she uses at present at home. That must be the destination of her call and her gateway where ever she is. Of course AOL have always been "different", but surely not so different.

[ithonicfury]

You could just dial that number, but long distance for data calls would probably be 10-15 cents a minute (even unlimited long distance plans dont cover data calls), and why pay that if you dont need to.

What access number you dialup to in AOL doesnt matter, your account isnt tied to the number you dial, or restricted on the number your dialing from.

Heres AOLs walkthrough of how to change your access number - http://help.aol.com/help/dynamickc.do?exte...articleId183221

If you just want 1 number without charging the persons phone your using, you can use the AOL toll free number (also 10 cents a minute, but is charged on your AOL bill instead of on the phone bill).

http://help.aol.com/help/dynamickc.do?exte...articleId217518