Telephone Services and Telecommunications
for Professional Truck Drivers

While telephone services and telephones can be a professional truck driver's lifeline for business and personal use, they vary greatly in quality and availability. Which work best and which are the best bargain?

Finding a Telephone on the Road

Enter just about any truckstop at the professional drivers' entrance and you'll see a row of telephones on the wall. In some truckstop restaurants, you can still see a telephone is installed in at least a few booths. The reason is obvious: professional truck drivers need to communicate.

Believe it or not, we put up with this "find a phone" situation for a long time.

While we may have eventually gotten a mobile or cellular phone just for dealing with our company, that wasn't the motivation behind why we got one.

The Event that Led Up to our First Telephone Service on the Road

If you've ever been in an emergency situation, you know that nothing can replace having a telephone with you. Such was the case late one night when we were traveling south on I-85 toward Charlotte, NC. We noticed that the driver of a car, also heading south, was weaving all over the road. He was obviously drunk or strung out on drugs. ("Yikes, honey, did you see that? He just barely missed that concrete barricade?!")

To prevent a very serious accident, we attempted -- but were unsuccessful -- in getting the attention of law enforcement on Channels 9 and 19 on the CB radio. We couldn't even locate another truck driver with a cell phone who could relay the information via 911 to law enforcement.

We ended up pulling into the rest area near Concord and calling in the driver from a pay telephone. We never saw the driver again and hope he didn't wreck. But we were so shaken by the experience that we decided that the next time we went back home, we would get telephone service with nationwide coverage.

Our First Cell Phone Service

We didn't plan to use the telephone services much, which was a good thing because being as how we traveled all over the country, we would have incurred hefty roaming charges away from our home area. Thankfully, cell phone coverage has greatly improved since then.

Summary

Numerous telephone services and telephones -- each having pros and cons -- are available to let you stay in touch with both business and personal contacts. Among them are: Cell, cellular and mobile telephones; Calling cards; Toll-free numbers; VOIP (Voice-Over-Internet Protocol) phone service; Magic Jack; Prepaid cell phones such as TracFone; and Satellite telephones.

On the linked pages, you'll find out which ones we've used and which we consider to be the best. As is the case with most technology, however, we haven’t tried everything available, so we’d like to have your feedback on which telephone services and telephones work best for you and why, on the form at the bottom of this page.

We address texting and cell phone use while driving. 

We will also be discussing other forms of telecommunications used by truck drivers. Furthermore, we plan to have input from experts in the field to help you save as much money as possible.

Money saving tip: No matter what kind of telephone services or telephones you are considering getting that allow you to make calls away from home, check on such things as: activation fees, contract period, cancellation fees, service period vs. airtime, coverage area, roaming charges, plan's number of minutes per month, cost of additional minutes, cost of additional telephones and lines (such as for family members), cost of additional services (such as sending text messages), billing increments (for example: 6 seconds vs. 1 minute), required accessories (headset, charger, belt clips, etc.), number of "anytime" minutes, number of night and weekend minutes, and all other fees, including a fee for using a pay phone.