- Do you need rock solid bullet
proof internet in your RV? - Yes, I sure do.
- We do. - Yeah, this guy is gonna show you how to get it.
- Right now. - I'm gonna go back to work. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - So welcome to the bat cave. This is where Tara and I
work full time on the channel and also my day job. - Hello.
- Hello. Tara's going to be editing back here, so you're gonna see stuff going on on the screen back here. Probably on a video that's already out by the time you see this. - Top secret.
- Top secret right now, but you know, once it's out, it won't be. So we're gonna go through
a lot of stuff here, and I'm gonna try not to
super geek out on you. Tara's gonna try to keep me in line, so I don't go off on too many tangents. If you watched our first internet video, you know that was over two years ago. We've been living in this
RV for two and a half years and while that system was very adequate and it did the job initially, it had some ups and downs
that I'm gonna get to, but it was time for an update. It was time for something
a little more solid, a little more resilient. We want to start doing
more lives with our channel and things like that. We just need better, more stable internet. If you've already seen
our mobile internet video from two years ago and you
want to just skip to the part where we show our new stuff, meaning you're already kind of familiar with the ins and outs of mobile internet, we'll have links below. You can click on that and
jump right to that section, but we're going to
cover some of the basics just so we have some groundwork before I show you our new setup. Also for the purpose of this video, mobile internet means mobile, meaning you're actually moving, you know, moving more frequently than would be practical for you to actually get like cable or
DSL or something like that. If you're seasonal or
you're staying in a place for three or four months, then move, your best bet for internet is probably going to be
whatever's offered locally. What we're going to talk about
today is strictly mobile. We move about every two weeks. Some of you move more often, some less, but the whole idea here is you take it with you wherever you go. That said, since I'm not gonna teach you everything there is to
know about internet, I don't want to leave
you without a resource to find out everything you want to know. That is the Mobile
Internet Resource Center. You've heard me talk about this before, even in our video two years ago, and nothing's changed there other than they've got even more content. Mobile Internet Resource Center is done by Chris and Cherie. Their YouTube channel is Technomadia. That's like their travel,
RV and boating channel. And the Mobile Internet
Resource Center is gold. It's got everything you
could possibly want to know about mobile internet from
down to modem details, to signal strengths and decibel levels and they do testing on everything. This is what they do full time. Now part of their website
is membership-based, it's called the Mobile
Internet Aficionados, and I highly recommend that. They eat live, drink,
breathe this stuff 24/7. They're always on top of it, so you definitely want to check them out. Another thing I'm super
excited to share with you guys is their new mobile internet
interactive video course. For those of you who just kind of, don't know where to start, where to jump in, this
course will take you from the ground up with each layer kind of building on the next. They start out kind of small and go over some of the general concepts and then they'd drive that all
the way down into modem specs and what you need and how to find it. Now, one thing I also really
like about this course that I hadn't really thought about and I'm gonna steal it for this video is the way they break
it down into data plans, devices and signal enhancing. 'Cause really those three things kind of all go together for
this mobile internet situation. You got to kind of have a little bit of a handle on all three of those for you to get decent mobile internet. So let me cover just a little
bit about mobile internet and what some of your options are. For this I'm going to
go to the whiteboard. So our little box here that is
just representative of an RV, I realize it's pretty generic. It's just a box with some wheels, but at least it's got wheels. And of course up on the
right hand corner here is our internet. And the whole idea here is to
be able to connect devices. Now you've got TVs in here,
you've got cell phones, you've got computers, it's
a keyboard by the way. And the idea here is to
get all of these things connected to the internet, right? So a lot of people ask
about campground wifi, they ask about wifi boosters, and so let's take a look
at that scenario here. You've got a campground wifi here. This is an antenna and they
are connected to the internet. The signals from their wifi come right in and you can connect a right to those. The problem there is you might
be far away from the signal, so you might think, okay,
let's get a signal booster. Great, let's get those out of here. Let's put a little antenna on their roof and it has a better capability
to see those signals and then rebroadcast it inside. Great, we've boosted that signal. Here's the problem. This part here, where they're
connected to the internet is probably crap. It may be some DSL line. It may be a cable modem
that isn't very fast. And also it's being shared by
everybody else in the RV park. So you've got this DSL line or whatever, and everybody's connecting to it and it's going to be garbage. I can tell you this from experience. In two and a half years, and just probably over 100
campgrounds and RV parks, we have never ever,
ever found a good wifi. It's not there, it doesn't exist, so it's up to you to create your own. So let's talk a little
bit about satellite. I'm gonna try to draw a
little satellite here. It's got antennas sticking out. It looks a little bit more like Sputnik. So you got a satellite up here in space. It actually has to relay
back down to the ground, to a base station and then
back up, out to the internet and you've got to somehow
talk to the satellite from your RV. Well, there's a couple of problems here. The biggest one being there's just no real good
option out there currently. The options that do exist
currently are super expensive and super, super limited in
their data caps and the speed. It's a mess. You don't want to deal
with satellite period. Now you may have been seeing
some things on the news about Starlink and Elon
Musk and his company launching all of these
low earth orbit satellites for global internet coverage. That's going to be pretty cool. Long story short,
internet satellite sucks. It may be better in 2021, maybe 2022. We don't yet know what
it's going to look like in terms of equipment or cost
or data caps or any of that. So right now it's just a no go. So wifi stinks, satellite stinks. Our only other option is cellular. The good thing is it's
a really good option if you have the right equipment
and the right data plan, so let's get into that. Before we jump into cellular internet, I want to cover a couple of terms with you that we're going to be using so we just have a good
vocabulary to start with here. So you're gonna hear me
say a few things like MIMO, MIMO stands for multiple-in/multiple-out. And what that really
means is things like this, hotspots, routers, modems. Most of the newer ones have
the ability to do MIMO, which means they have
at least two antennas that can talk at the
same time to the tower, sometimes even on different
bands or different frequencies, when you've got two channels
going at the same time. The cool thing is it's like
doubling your throughput, right? Instead of having one antenna talking, you've got two antennas both talking and it can really help
improve your speeds. Another thing I want to mention
is signal strength and bars. A lot of times you're
looking on your phone here and you go, oh, I've got three bars. I should be good, right, or
I got four bars, fantastic. It doesn't really mean anything,
bars mean next to nothing. We've been in situations where
I've got one bar on my phone and we have great internet. We've been in situations
where I've got four bars and it's crap internet. Let's talk about some of your options just generally speaking, when
you want to connect things in your RV to the internet. The simplest of those is this
guy right here, cell phone. A lot of these can do what's
called tethering or sharing, and it'll depend on your data plan, so make sure you're allowed to do that, but essentially it looks like this. We've got our cell phone here and these guys connect over
wifi to the cell phone. The cell phone connects to the cell tower and then the cell tower to the internet. Again, real basic setup,
sharing off your cell phone, it's not great, but it will do in a pinch. A lot of computers also
support direct tethering, meaning I can plug this end into my phone and this end into my computer, my computer will see this directly and be able to communicate that way. The benefit there is I'm not communicating
wirelessly to the phone. You have to remember when you've got these
different technologies going on that every single point
in the chain is a chain. The thing about chains is they're only as good
as their weakest link. So if I've got my computer
connecting to this over wifi, then this connecting to the cell tower and then the cell tower
connected to the internet, if any one of those things is garbage, or if there's a lot of
interference on one end or anywhere in between, it
can 'cause bad problems. Which is again, why bars
aren't the end all be all. Even your wifi bars. I could have a great wifi signal here, but if it has a bad connection
somewhere down the line, it's gonna be bad here. So let's talk about one notch up from that and that is a mobile hotspot. This device is called a hotspot and that's just kind of a generic term. I think it might be actually licensed by somebody or something,
but the whole idea here is this is a cellular data
connection in a little box. So that looks like this. We've got our hotspot and all of your devices
connect to this hotspot and then the hotspot
connects to the tower, the tower connects to the internet. The benefit here is
these have built in wifi, so you can take this, you
can stick it on a window, you can put it somewhere where
it's got a good connection and it can actually serve
as your entire internet. It's not great, but again,
it'll do in a pitch. One of the catches with hotspots is they are usually carrier lot, meaning this one is for AT&T, this one's AT&T, this one's for Verizon. You can't just move the
SIM cards back and forth and have it go from one plane to the next. If you want some redundancy
in your mobile internet, which we highly recommend. Another drawback to these hotspots. Is the wifi that they
produce is not great. It's not super strong. I would venture to say, if I had the hotspot sitting back here, I wouldn't be able to
reach it from the bedroom. It's not strong. Additionally, what we found is it's not really stable either. We've had to reboot these
multiple times a day and they can be a bit of
a pain, but it's simple. One device, boom, you're done. So the next step up from
just a plain old hotspot is a hotspot plus a router. And this is where we've
been for the past two and a half years is we've
had this wifi ranger. And this wifi ranger serves
as our internal wifi. The cool thing about this versus having a couple of
different ones of these is, I can configure all of our
devices, our Apple TVs, our computers, our phones to connect to one device, this thing. And then this thing talks to these things to get to the internet
and it looks like this. You've got your hotspot here. I'm gonna try to do an R. These also give the added benefit of having wired connections available. So in that situation, it
looks a bit like this. The computer might be hardwired, whereas the TV and the phones
might connect over wifi. The router is connected to the hotspot and then the hotspot to the
tower, tower to the internet. The biggest benefit here
is I've got one device that kind of manages it, right? So when we would get to
a location in the past, I would test AT&T I would test Verizon, whichever one was better I would plug into this guy over
USB and get to the internet. You'll notice that
sometimes I talk about wifi. Sometimes I talk about wired. Wired is always better. Whether we're talking about
ethernet to a guy like this, or whether we're talking
about connecting this to the hotspot through a USB cable. Anywhere you can eliminate
wireless connectivity is best because you're
always going to be dealing with interference from other things. Our phones are doing wifi. Everything's got wifi on it. And when you're in a crowded
RV park or campground, everybody's got their own wifi, whether it's their phones
or devices or whatever, it's just the airwaves are pretty full. So the next step up from
dedicated mobile router and I'll also mention here that I'm talking strictly
about mobile routers. The difference between a mobile
router and a regular router is a mobile router is designed to talk to something cellular. So this guy has the ability
to talk to this guy. He knows how to use them. He knows how to communicate. A normal router's not going
to be able to do that. Another option that you have
with something like this is called wifi as WAN, meaning all of my devices
inside can connect to this and then this can connect to another wifi. Where wifi as WAN comes into play, is you can have something like this, which serves as your hub, inside your RV for all
your devices to talk to, but let's say that I need
to put this in a window or somewhere where it's
got a better signal where a USB cord can't reach. Well, I can plug this
one in wherever I want and I can turn on its wifi. I can connect to this
guy via wired or wifi and then this guy connects
to this guy over wifi, which connects to the cell tower, which connects to the internet. The other thing is if you do end up in an RV park or campground
that does have good wifi, congratulations, you have
found the golden goose, but this guy can do that talking for you, so you don't have to
change all of your devices to talk to the campground wifi. They're still talking to this and then this guy talks to the wifi. The next step up in
mobile internet devices is a cellular embedded router. I'd show you one, but ours is actually mounted to the wall up there. I'll show it to you. But the idea is rather
than having to connect this to some other modem like this or like this is the modem is built in and I
can stick a SIM card in there and this guy has it all in one. He has the internet connection,
he has the wifi connection, and the cool thing about cellular embedded is they're not usually
tied to a specific carrier, so you can put a SIM card
in for AT&T, for Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, whatever you've got, you can put it in there
and it can connect to it. Additionally, many of them, like the ones I'm going
to show you from Pepwave have multiple SIM slots, meaning that if you've got
an ATT&T and a Verizon, like we do, which again,
we highly recommend because we've been in situations where we've got a great Verizon signal and no AT&T and we've been in the opposite where we've got great AT&T and no Verizon. So having two carriers is really a must. If you're going to be on the
road and you need internet, like we do, you need two carriers. So if you remember me talking about Chris and Cherie's course, the three big players are plans, devices and signal enhancing, right? So signal enhancing can
be as something as simple as this guy right here. This is a Netgear MIMO antenna and I've lost one of
the little suction cups, but this was our go to for a long time. This is a MIMO meaning it's
got two connections here to connect to a modem
and it's directional, so it's got a couple of benefits there as far as signal enhancing goes. Number one, you can see it's bigger. It's got a bigger antenna
than can possibly exist in something like this. Number two, it's directional. You can put it in a window and point it in a rough
direction of a tower. You may not know where the tower is, but you can test it in different windows and see where you get the best speed. We've used this religiously for the last two and a half years. If you're gonna start
out with a basic setup with just a hotspot, get one of these, it's like 20 bucks on Amazon. They plug right in right here. These are called TS9 connectors
and they just plug right in and it's been phenomenal. So another signal enhancing option, regardless of what set up
you're talking about here, whether it's just a hotspot or whether it's a router plus a hotspot or even whether it's a
cellular embedded router is a booster. So a booster's whole
purpose is to number one, get an antenna on the outside. Antenna that looks like this,
this guy goes on your ladder or on a pole or something
and it sits outside, so it has better line
of sight to the tower. And then that runs inside
to the booster piece. This is the guy that
actually takes a signal and amplifies it. And then that connects
to an inside antenna. And that inside antenna sits right up next to your hotspot. I mean, literally when
we would connect these, they'd be like this, like an inch apart. And there have been several situations where we've been in areas
that were way far away and we absolutely would have zero internet without a booster, but here's
the catch with the booster. Is there not MIMO, they're one channel. So we see a lot of people all the time and we'll have these booster antennas, and they've got their
boosters on all the time. 90% of the time that booster is going to hurt their
performance, not help it. As soon as you plug in the booster and that's the strongest
signal and it's one channel, out go those other connections and you're cutting yourself
in half or in quarters as far as when you're
talking about internet speed. So boosters are great in
very specific circumstances and no other time. Last but not least, let's
talk about data plans. And quite honestly, this is the most
difficult piece right now. I can spend money on routers
and I can buy antennas and I can do all kinds of stuff if we have enough money for it, right? The trouble is they're useless
without a good data plan. Now you might think you
have an unlimited data plan on your cellular service, probably wrong. The reason being is yes, it is unlimited, but what a lot of carriers do is they put throttles and data caps. As soon as you hit a certain threshold, like 15 gigs or 10 gigs
or 22 gigs, whatever, there's a certain level
where you're going to hit and one of two things is going to happen. You're either gonna have a hard throttle, which means they're gonna
just put the brakes on you and you're going to get like 128 kilobit, it's gonna be like dial up AOL style. Internet's going to be horrible. You're not going to be
able to stream anything. The other type of throttle is called a network management throttle. That's actually what we
have on our AT&T plan. When we reached 22 gigabytes, we are subject to network management. And all that means is if they
need the extra bandwidth, we're gonna be deprioritized. That's actually not a bad thing. I mean, sure, you'd rather
have no throttle ever, but when it comes to data
plans, that's not too bad. We've never really seen
any serious throttling over 22 gigabytes and we use
a lot more than 22 gigabytes. So, what do you do? You go to Verizon right now, they're going to try to sell
you their unlimited plan. Same thing with AT&T, neither
of them are good plans as far as mobile internet goes. A quick note on the
data plan side of things is we do have a resource for you now, and we're going to get
into that in just a second. So that's the overview that's data plans, devices, signal enhancing things,
antennas, stuff like that. So I want to talk just
briefly about our old system, what we liked, what we don't like and then we're going to
talk about our new system. All the stuff that I've showed you here was basically our old internet
set up, our WiFiRanger. We've gone through a couple
of different hotspots over the last couple of years. It's done its job, but not
without some pain here and there. When we would get to a new location, it would be at least 30 minutes of trying, let's try this window,
let's try that window, Let's try Verizon, let's try AT&T, let's get on the roof,
let's try the booster. Sometimes it could take 30, 60 minutes just to get the internet set up. We wanted to get away from that and have something a little more stable that also has some redundancies built in so that if one goes down, one takes over, I've been looking for a good partner in this area for a long time, because you guys have been
asking, hey, how do we do this? How do we do that? And I would always refer
you to our old system knowing that it was
okay, but it, you know, it wasn't as solid as we'd like. And I also didn't have
any place to send you guys for data plans or help. Now I've got one place I can send you guys and it's called Mobile Must Have. Data plans for both AT&T and Verizon, everything from WiFiRangers
to cellular embedded modems, to single modems, to
double modems, to antennas. They've got all that stuff, everything you need, you can
go to one place and get it. And they are very good
about qualifying you, meaning if you don't know what you want, you can call them and say,
hey, here's what I need. I gotta have my Skype calls be rock solid or I gotta have my video
calls be rock solid or it's not that big of a deal, I just want to stream internet
and have videos or whatever. They can take your requirements and get you into the
right gear the first time. They have a setup option
as part of your purchase. I went through it with them when they sent us our
cellular embedded router. And they'll go through,
they'll spend a good hour with you and they'll
help you configure it. They'll teach it to you. They'll show you the interface. And I just, I love it. I can send you guys there. We'll have links below in
the description of course. They are an affiliate, so we do make a commission off of that. It doesn't cost you anything else, but you'll also save
5% if you use our link. So we'll have links below for that. Also full disclosure they did send us the Ultimate Road Warrior RV and boat internet access bundle with
Mobile Mark 7-in-1 antenna. That's a lot to say, but
basically the cool thing about this is they have kits where they've put together
the router part of it, along with signal enhancing part of it., and you can get the data
plan part of it all at once. It's awesome and it's really cool to be able to work with
a company that we trust. They're also RVers, they know the pain, they know the struggles and
they're going to help you with whatever you need to get. All right, so let's
jump into our new setup and I'm super excited to show you guys. I know we said, we talk about this under the guise of data plans,
devices, signal enhancing. So let's talk just real
quickly about our data plans. We've gone through two Verizon plans that have both gotten the ax, so we have no Verizon right now. Right now we have two AT&T plans, our old grandfathered
plan that we got in 2017. And we also have an AT&T
plan through Mobile Must Have and we're on a waiting
list for a Verizon plan. So what I'm going to show you today, we have two AT&T plans going. Let's talk about gear. Now, if you watched our old video, you know we kind of had over here, we had our WiFiRanger and cables and antennas and boosters
and all that stuff just sort of all stuck up
there with command strips for two and a half years. As you can see that wall
is nice and clean now and everything is up here. You notice we went with
a tech cabinet approach where basically all of the
stuff terminates in one area, like a cabinet and that
way it's really easy to hook things up to it. You know where everything is, it's out of the way
and it's off the walls. So right here we have our
Netgear eight port switch. This is basically just to control, connect all the hardwired items like here we've got connections from Tara's computer and my computer, connections to our NAS, which is down here,
network attached storage, which gives us 12 terabytes
of storage on our network for all of our video files. And we have a uninterruptible power supply to power all of it and
give it a nice clean power even if the power goes out. And up here is the main attraction. This is the Peplink
Pepwave MAX transit Duo. And you can see that we've
got cables coming in. These go to our roof antenna. And this basically runs
up through the bunk here and up to the roof. So here we've got MIMO
antennas for modem two, MIMO antennas or modem one. We have a GPS connection and back here are the connections for
the wifi on the roof. You will also notice
a little hole up here. This goes to a junction box on our roof where I can easily run cables
from an exterior antenna, be it our MIMO XPOL antenna, which I'm going to show you
or a booster if we try that. So let's chat a little bit about the wifi side of this router. It's got dual band wifi built into it, and that can connect via the ports, like I have it now
going to a roof antenna. And you can also set up
separate access points inside, which I'm gonna show you also. The reason I did that is because I wanted the wifi on the roof, just in case we happen
to be in a situation where we have good campground
wifi, not very likely, but I want to be able to
test it at each location and be able to report back to you guys on how it is, is it good, is it a bad? 99% chance it's going to be bad. The trouble is with the wifi
access point on the roof, the wifi inside isn't that great. So you can get an access
point that integrates with this thing seamlessly. You don't really have to
configure it or anything. You just plug it in and it starts working. After you set up your wifi
and define your access points in the Pepwave interface, if you add access points via
physical actual access points, then it just configures it automatically. Now I did have an access point right here to kind of serve inside the RV. The trouble was I wanted to
be able to use the setups since this is on the whole
time we're going down the road, I wanted our devices in the vehicle, in the truck to be able
to access the internet through this setup. Why not, it's there, it's running, it's always finding the best tower and that good stuff. The trouble is with the access point here, it did not reach the truck very well, so let me show you what I did. You might see a cable right there that runs up past that speaker and into the duct work here, that duct work runs all the
way to the front, around, and all the way to the back, so what I did since this thing
can be powered over ethernet I just ran an ethernet
cable into that duct and then all the way up
front and I'll show you. So up here at our bedroom, you can see we've got a
vent here and a vent here. Those are two different
sides of the racetrack system and in here is the access point. Pepwave. So this gives us good
coverage in the entire RV, but it's also sitting
right up here somewhere so it's not far from the front of the RV and the last time we traveled, it worked great. Our GPS and our phones and Tara's laptop could all connect to
the internet just fine. So the MAX Transit Duo does
come with these blade antennas, if you don't have an external antenna, so this can be set up
and run just as it is without having to deal with
the roof or anything like that, but I really recommend the kit. I mean, part of the trouble with having, when we had the router and hotspots and everything on the wall in here was getting it up higher
or getting access, getting better line of sight to the tower. So you can use these, but
we just got them in a bag because we have a roof antenna. And that's one thing I really like about what Mobile Must Have has done is create these bundles where
you get the matching antenna with the right router and you
can put it all in yourself. A little note about
installing the antenna. I'm not gonna show you
a lot of details there because every RV is going to be different. I will tell you that
the Mobile Mark antenna that we got with our
system, it's been great. It does require a ground plane, but you can buy that with it. That's just basically a piece of metal that sits underneath the antenna. And for our installation I discovered that right here in this bunk was a perfect distance, it was equal distance between this AC and the AC in the middle there. You want to have at least 18
inches from anything like that, more if you can. You also want to try
to use the stock cables that come with the antenna
and no more than that. So it takes a little bit of planning to figure out where you're
gonna put your router, where you're going to put the antenna and how you're going to connect the two. You don't want to use extension cables unless it's absolutely necessary because every extra foot
of cable adds impedance, which means you're going to lose signal. Also every connector, so if you've got extension cables and you're connecting all
seven to another extension, it's just bad news. Your best option is to install it and figure out where you can put it so that the length of cable
that comes with the antenna, which I want to say is
maybe about three meters, roughly 10 feet. You want to make sure that
it can route properly. For us in our 397, down through the bunk, across the bunk and to here worked great. I also use the AC outlet, that is in the bunk to power
the UPS that's up there. So it's great, it's all nice and compact. It's all boom, it's right there. Don't have to mess with it. I don't have to move any
antennas or do anything. It's just solid. Another thing we opted to purchase in addition to the kit was bam. (laughing) This guy. This is a MIMO directional antenna. It's called an XPOL, X-P-O-L. That's just how I'm going
to say it is X-Paul, but this thing along
with this antenna mast, this is a 25 foot telescoping antenna that mounts to the side of the RV. It's really super simple to set up. It's got mount points and then I just slide these right in, crank the antenna up and then these cables come straight down through that port that I showed you up there. I have a junction box on the roof. I can just run that cable straight in, disconnect one of my antennas
from the mobile market antenna and plug this right in
using these SMA connectors. And let me tell you what,
this antenna is amazing. We first got this
equipment in North Carolina in the mountains and even
with the roof antenna, with the mobile mark,
it was a little sketchy. If you've ever been in the mountains and tried to get a cell signal, you know that you might have
a great signal in one place and then you go 100 yards
in another direction and the signal is crap. So mountains can play a big part in that line of sight between
your antenna and the tower. That's where this guy comes in. When I got this guy set
up in North Carolina, man, it was night and day difference. Look at that sucker. That thing is way up there, man. That is awesome. We're talking about around
five megabit download, like 30 megabit download. So getting this thing up, pointing it in the general
direction of a tower and there are a couple of tools
you can use to find towers. I'll put some links below. I like cellmapper.net. There's also some iPhone
and Android utilities you can use to help find towers, or you can just point it and look at your readout on your interface to see what your decibel levels are and see which way is
getting the best signal. Okay, so I showed you the physical install and how all that is, and
that's all really cool and the fact that we've
got the antenna on the roof and we don't have to
set anything up anymore, but what really makes this cool and takes advantage of this setup of particularly the dual modems is the software and the interface. I'm not gonna jump into that. There are some videos
Mobile Must Have has online and likely some other videos too that you can find on the
Pepwave Peplink interface. But what I want to talk about
is what dual modems gives you. So right out of the gate, when you've got two modems
set up, you've got two, right? So if one fails the other
one's still chugging along. If that one fails the
other one's still chugging and it gives you a bit of
redundancy in that fashion. Now by itself, it doesn't have
any kind of automatic fail over for some software. Like if you're streaming something, if you're watching YouTube or Netflix. most streaming software protocols do an automatic kind of fail over. So when you've got two modems, if one of them has a hiccup, if say Verizon goes down,
but AT&T is still working, that's an automatic switch over. The software, the streaming software does that automatically. The way the connections work
when you've got dual modems is basically whichever
one it gets to first. That's a little bit simplified. You can create some rules in here that say which one is used for what
types of streaming or protocols, voice calls, things like that. But some software is not good about failing over automatically, namely like Skype, Zoom, a lot of those, if you lose that connection
even for a second, you have to disconnect
and reconnect manually. Now I don't know exactly which software can fail over automatically
and which ones are manual, but I know that when I've
lost Zoom calls in the past, I had to reconnect. So in that particular situation, it does help you in that there is always, or hopefully if one connection fails, the other connection is there. And when you reconnect, it's very quick, you don't have to go troubleshooting
the one that went down. But for those of you like us who really need a much better connection, something that's a little more redundant and automatic and fail safe, there's a thing called Speed Fusion. Now, this is a technology, this is their brand for
Pepwave and Peplink. And basically what it is,
is it's a virtual tunnel. It's kind of like a
virtual private network. And to set that up, you need something on
the other end, right? So I've got my Peplink here. It has to connect to
something that understands how to set up the other side
of the speed fusion tunnel. Now Peplink does have their own thing called Speed Fusion Cloud
that you can actually use and you can purchase in chunks
I think of 10 gigabytes. Don't quote me on that
'cause that's bound to change and you could also set up your own. If you're a super tech savvy and you know how to set up an instance in Amazon web services,
then you can, or whatever, you can set up your own
backend for Speed Fusion. But you don't have to worry about that if you're a Mobile Must Have customer because they have you
covered there as well. Now I believe it's a $99
setup and $30 a month, but that gets you a terabyte,
up to a terabyte of data. So it's definitely the
best option out there. Let's touch briefly on
the Speed Fusion thing and why it's so cool for somebody who needs a very resilient, high availability type of connection. What it does is it's a virtual tunnel and it looks like one connection here, but it's using both at the
same time on the back end. It also gives you a little
bit of a bandwidth increase, but not as much as you might think. If I've got a 15 meg connection and a 15 meg connection, I'm not going to get 30 megs down. The reason being is it takes
a little bit of your bandwidth to manage the overhead of the connection. And depending on the type
of connection you set up, whether you configure it
for ultimate resiliency, which basically sends all
traffic down both pipes and if one fails, one keeps going, that has a lot of overhead to it and you're not going to get
much speed gain off of that. But the other way you can go
is configured more for speed, which is what we have. You still have the redundancy
and the resiliency, but more of the overhead
is geared towards speed versus the resiliency. So Mobile Must Have can help set you up with whichever kind of
connection you need to have for your business or whatever it is you're running out of your RV. And I'm not gonna say more about that because I could just go on forever, but it's really, really cool. And you can see, I don't know if you can
see this right here. We've got our Dropbox uploading files and it's using both connections and it's balanced between the
two and it just works, man. It's just solid. So that's it, that's
our new super fantastic mega awesome internet set up. It's so good. Yeah, it might be
overkill for those of you who are looking for something real basic and I get that, but if you
are running your business or something out of your RV, or even if you're just taking vacations and you need super solid internet, this might be something
you want to look into and be well worth the investment. For us, definitely is. - Keep your eyes open on our social media for announcements for our
big upcoming giveaway. - Yup, when we hit that a 100K mark, we're gonna be giving away lots of stuff, including some internet stuff. - That's right, thanks.
