Macwhizkid: Your options are as follows:

a) Look up the island and it's location on coverage maps on Rogers, Bell, and Telus. Note that Bell and Telus do share the same network (Bell is eastern Canada, Telus Western Canada, and they share each others towers to give coverage in all areas of the country). But you do need to look at the coverage map. If it shows little to no coverage in your area, you will probably be out of luck. There are large portions of Canada without any network coverage or only in certain populated areas.

b) If you are looking at WIND mobile or Mobilicity, or any other upstart/new provider in Canada, you may as well forget it. Their coverage is really, at the time of this writing, in major metropolitan areas. Outside of these areas you pay for roaming with Rogers, Bell, or Telus. So forget them unless your in Toronto, Vancouver, and within the city limits.

c) If you do have coverage -- your best bet is to call your mobile carrier. US carriers have fantastic agreements by our (Canadian) standards. For example, it costs us $.01/KB for data in the US (that's $10 per megabyte) but since there are so many americans compared to us, you guys get excellent rates. I have heard of roaming rates into Canada from the US that make my head spin it's so cheap.

d) Then compare to the price of a data plan with Rogers, Bell, or Telus. Look at pay as you go options, but keep in mind they tend NOT to allow tethering as this may be charged as extra (and so high that you will probably balk at it). Any non pay as you go option would require you to have a Canadian address to register the account to and may require you to sign a contract. Since this is highly unlikely, pay as you go is your best choice, IF and only if your US carrier cannot give you a plan that is cost effective.

e) Consider the following hardware problems: To use your Phone (CDMA) or Ipad (GSM) you will probably require deactivation of the CDMA phone on your existing carrier, and for GSM, you need a Rogers sim card, which cost approx $25 (for reguar sims, they may charge more for ipad micro sims). If your ipad is LOCKED to your carrier, this will not be an option. Again, if you want to use your verizon sim, you have to have a verizon account and appropriate roaming, no other way around this.

f) Another tip: Bell/Telus are CDMA and 3G+ GSM, they do not support any 2g devices. Rogers has had GSM since 2002 and supports both 2G and 3G+ devices.

Good luck