2022 Ultimate Internet Setup with Starlink and Peplink

hi guys this is andy from mobile must have and in this video we're gonna go over the internet setup in eric's rv now this video was originally posted on his original blog channel livenlight.net but we decided to repost it here as it's extremely relevant content to what a lot of our followers are looking for and researching this video is also great as eric covers how he's expanded his pep wave to work with 5g modems as well as starlink and integrating kind of all the super popular and really the best options for mobile internet out there so you don't just have one thing you're relying on you're not just on cellular you're not just on campground wi-fi you're not just on on satellite as they all have their pros and cons this is a great way and he's gone over how he kind of links everything together to bring it all kind of into one solution all right so guys here you go here's eric we've been traveling on the road since 2015 and in those seven years we have been working from the road the entire time most folks know us as the founders of mobilemusthave.com an online retailer that specializes in mobile connectivity and it's been five years since i've done a video about our setup and what we use to stay connected on the road and let's just say lots of stuff has changed we use starlink as you can see here and we've built this nifty auto deploying antenna mask that we'll tell you about a little bit it's not something we sell but you can build one if you'd like with parts that you can get on the internet and we use a variety of other solutions to stay connected that are combined into a central dashboard that allow us to pick the best connection while we're traveling on the road come along with us and i'll tell you all about [Music] i look at three major things when i'm looking at designing a mobile internet solution and i kind of call them the three r's the first one is i'm looking for reliability a lot of people focus on speed when it comes to internet speed is very important but for me a reliable connection that is absolutely you know going to work for me in zoom calls and mobile work is is super important i'm also looking for reliable hardware and i want pieces of components that are built properly and built well with good software that runs them so i don't have to reboot them all the time or feel like i have to replace them every year reliability is my first r my second requirement is resiliency i want a solution that if it goes offline for any reason tends to be able to get itself back online without me having to intervene myself by rebooting the device i want something with some logic where if i go out of a cell coverage area for a bit while i'm driving when i get back into a coverage area it will connect back up and i don't have to do a lot of you know hands-on intervention to keep it going the third r is redundancy i want to know that i have more than one connection when i'm traveling on the road there's so many variables weather my physical location how many other rvers are in the area if there's a nascar event in the area who knows and all of those a solar storm we've had one of those that affected us there are so many variables that can can affect a connection so it's very important that we have multiple connections and a central command center that can control all of them that's our redundancy our third r and i hear my wife behind the camera giggling a little bit because she said what about the fourth r really easy to use and she's probably right when i'm not around to be a techie i need to know that this solution is going to allow her to do her job as well and she doesn't want to have to mess with it we want it to act as much like home internet as possible so with all of the current technology available starlink cellular free wi-fi those are kind of the big ones we see most people use which one is the best and what do you need to stay connected and we've said this multiple times in multiple training forums and quite a bit of videos unfortunately there is no single correct solution that will work for everyone and if you are moving around and you're mobile or if you just consider internet mission critical unfortunately it's typically not going to be one solution that's going to get you there it's going to be multiple connections to the internet and having the ability to connect to more than one depending on what your environment variables are in those locations or at that time of day now today is definitely a geek out session a bunch of the stuff i'm going to show you we don't sell and it's stuff that i've determined i want to have in my arsenal as someone who is in the business and needs to stay connected at all times the vast vast majority ninety percent of our customers aren't getting themselves involved in such a complex setup as what i'm going to show you today but 90 plus percent of our customers are using the central hub or command center that i'm going to show you downstairs to be the kind of hub or entry point into their mobile internet solution from there plenty of customers add on components and you know starlink being one but not everybody does and not everybody has to the solutions that we sell at mobilemusthave.com are very modular meaning that you can start out with one component and you can add to it as you learn more about what your internet requirements are and your needs are before i show you some of the components we have here on the roof and then we go down into the cabin and i show you how it's all connected together i kind of want to just cut to the chase and tell you what we are finding right now as of 2022 for our internet needs and what we're using the most we use our starlink internet solution as our kind of like primary internet solution about 20 of the time and people are oftentimes really surprised by that um the vast majority of the time when we do have issues now that they've enabled the roaming feature in starlink is related to us just not having enough sky for it to pick up enough satellites to retain and maintain a reliable connection a case in point or example right now we're at um the mobile must-have garage here in in the northeast and i'll just kind of show you panning up straight from the camera right here how much sky we have available it's a lot and then i'll pan over and show you the trees on this side and the roof over here we do not see a very reliable connection with our starlink at this location and because a lot of campgrounds are wooded or have trees or we like to park in shade we find that about four out of five times when we try to use this it's not functional now before when we didn't have it mounted up here we had the ability to run it around and we came with 75 feet of cable and that did help somewhat but campsites are not the largest and unless you want to go knocking on doors and asking people if you can put expensive equipment that people may want to take out in the driveway somewhere we thought this was the better solution and ultimately even when it was kind of mobile and we could move it around the yard we didn't find that it really improved our ability to use it that much so between it being kind of cumbersome and big and needing so much sky it's something we only use about 20 percent of the time so why bother with starlink well man when it works it's fast and it's awesome and it tends to work in the areas where we find cellular is struggling or having problems when we're like down on the colorado river you know down in arizona or on the kind of arizona california border where there's a lot of valleys and mountainous terrain on both sides and cell signals just can't penetrate those rocks this thing has saved our butts and kept us connected those are also the areas when we're really out in the middle of nowhere and there's we're not really fighting a lot of big elm trees in arizona so it's worked out really well for us um but again it's only about 20 of the time that we're using that solution about 10 of the time believe it or not we actually use wi-fi right now we're using wi-fi because our rfe is parked uh next to a a location or a garage that we have that has really good internet that we have wi-fi access to we don't tend to use wi-fi as much when we're in a campground although it has been something that has been really beneficial to us when we needed it in a pinch and the starlink wasn't able to get a signal so about 10 percent for what we call wi-fi as wan or the ability to connect to free public wi-fi or your home wi-fi and use that as your internet okay so that's 30 we have to get up to 100 so what do we use 70 of the time we use cellular internet for our connectivity what we like about cellular is that it doesn't require full access to the sky it works while we're driving and it tends to be pretty reliable and resilient especially when you have connections to more than one cellular carrier what can be challenging about cellular internet is that sometimes those cell towers are saturated um and there's a lot of people using them and they're not the fastest and also it can be difficult to get your hands on some high gigabyte data plans these days though so those are some downsides to cellular but between cellular wi-fi or wi-fi is wan meaning we can connect to an external wi-fi and use it in our rv and the starlink we've got a lot of different options to stay connected okay so starting here in the middle this big birthday cake looking thing is a big seven in one antenna and we've got it mounted here on a six inch tall box that gives us a bit of height to get over these awning rails on the top of this integra motor coach the reason why we want to get up above those rails it's not necessary especially if you're in kind of you know more kind of good cell cover areas but for us if we want to get out there these are made of metal and by getting up above them we get a clearer line of sight to the cell tower now that big antenna has four cellular antennas two wi-fi antennas so that's how we pick up our campground wi-fi and a gps antenna that allows us to see where our coach is on a map next of course we've got our starlink here uh we'll provide a link in kind of a brief description not only of a wiring diagram but also just sort of a component list of of how this all works it's pretty simple we have a linear actuating arm and then what's called a i think it's called a j mast or a j pole um that it's mounted to um that allows it to go up and down with the use of a linear actuator controller that runs all on 12 volts which we have running up through the front here uh into the front area just above the drivers area that allows us to put up and down the starlink via this little remote control which i'll show you here and it's very handy and allows us to not have to climb on the roof every time we want to use it over here you might notice a little kind of three antenna guy here that's a wineguard connect device that came with our rv that utilizes a category 4 cellular modem that's not the fastest solution out there anything you find at mobilemustav.com is typically a category 6 or better so this is actually not enabled on our rv but it did come with it so i wanted to explain what it is i almost forgot this little antenna over here is our cell booster we have a weboost drive cellular booster candidly we don't use that very much to connect to the internet it is um something that has gotten us out of a couple pinches but now that we have the starlink solution the booster when we're really far out from cellular just doesn't seem to be something we're using as much why do we still have it well it does work really well to help our phones inside the rv when we're on fringe cell service areas for voice calls um and sometimes when you just want a voice call that's not running over your wi-fi to work really well a booster can be a really great solution so if you want better cell signal service on your phone uh inside your rv that's a nice touch and it doesn't interfere with any of the other solutions so you can add it if you'd like that said on the cell booster side we do find that that birthday cake big seven and one parsec antenna just tends to outperform pretty consistently um the booster in terms of upload and download speed just about everywhere we are so we stick with that antenna okay so that's a lot of stuff how does it all connect it's a little bit easier if i show you that with some diagrams down below as well as show you what's going on inside the cabin so let's hop down and we'll get to that now before we head inside um i have a tendency to get a little too geeky sometimes so i did want to kind of preface and say to you guys that the basic solutions that we're going to be talking about today are essentially the bundle that we have at mobilemustav.com called the ultimate road warrior vr2 vr2 just stands for version two they've come out with a newer modem in 2022 that we'll talk to you about in the video but i'll kind of get into some geeky stuff and show you how it's all connected and don't get overwhelmed it is something that you could you know if you wanted to start with the core functionality of what i keep calling the mobile command center or the peplink mobile command center you would get the roof antenna the router and the 12 volt connection cable as well as the option to add high gigabyte cellular data plants all with that ultimate road warrior vr2 bundle so enough of that you can buy peppering products from other people not just us the video is really more designed to be a tour but i know this stuff can get overwhelming for folks so i want you to know that there is a bundle that gets you really started with just about all the basics that you're going to see today and then you can add on separate components as you see them as i talk about them so let's get started all right guys so welcome to the front of our integra motorhome and this is where most of the brains of our tech operation live as you can see here you can't really tell much of anything's going on we like our technology to be hidden and essentially we don't want to look at it but we do also want it to be very accessible we've accomplished both of both of those things here in this front installation now a lot of people ask us where the ideal place is to put your tech cabinet and you know obviously you don't really want to look at all those wires but you also want it to be functional and accessible so for us the front area was a really easy place to run wires from the roof because the integra coaches have an integrated roof cap which means that if you drill a hole in the front of the roof cap you're not actually drilling into the roof you're drilling into the cap which is a little bit safer from a waterproofing perspective and then the cap is actually hollow down to this cabinet in this corner so it's a very convenient way for us to get our wires in from the roof now the only downside to running stuff to the front here is that your wireless your local wi-fi network will typically be transmitting from here or from the antenna on the roof depending on how you configure your antenna cables we'll get into that stuff more later but for the most part this is a pretty long rv at 45 feet and if we're transmitting from inside our tech cabinet there we are okay and still receiving wi-fi in the back but we have added an additional access point back there just because we have a lot of devices we'll show you that in a little bit so inside this tech cabinet you might have been expecting a bunch of wires and stuff and it's really actually pretty empty as you can tell most of the stuff you see in here is actually our camera gear and our chargers for cameras our internet stuff is all mounted up above and we'll get into that in a minute before we talk about what these components are again a reminder we will put up a link to some wiring diagrams so you understand how all of this stuff is connected but a key thing to understand if you're thinking about a higher end mobile internet solution like this is to understand a term called wan source or what is when now wan stands for wide area network and to keep this really simple a wan source which is what we want to make sure you understand is an internet source and there are different flavors or types of wind sources that can exist in a mobile router or mobile command center there are three common wan source types in mobile routers or mobile command centers there's really kind of four but we're going to focus on three i'll tell you what the fourth one is last the first type of mobile wan source is a modem typically a cellular modem so that's something that takes a sim card from a cellular provider and gets you onto a cellular network so when source number one or kind of way to connect to the internet number one is a cellular modem many mobile routers or mobile command centers including the one we have here have more than one modem so those are multi-modem devices so they can accept multiple sim cards and connect to multiple cellular connections usually from more than one cell carrier at the same time so when type number one is cellular modem and you can have more than one cellular modem in certain devices the second type of wan source is an ethernet wan and it at the front of the mobile router we have here we have an ethernet port like a network cable port that's labeled wan and what that allows us to do is connect an external internet source to our router that it will use as internet and it will use that in addition to the onboard cellular so that gets us up to two when types or actually three wand sources because this device has two cellular modems so cell modem one saw modem two and then our ethernet wan port is our third connection to the internet the next type of win is something called wi-fi wan and that uses the wireless antennas on this mobile router to connect to external wireless networks like campground wi-fi or in the case for me here at the mobile must-have garage i can connect to the wi-fi broadcasting from our shop the mobile router we have here has two wi-fi wands built into it meaning it can connect to two different channels of wi-fi at the same time so for us we can connect to the two gigahertz longer range wi-fi that is available in our shop and the five gigahertz wi-fi available in our shop to give us two connections to the wi-fi at the same time so if you add that all up that's a lot of different connections to the internet i have my cellular modem one my cellular modem two my ethernet port which we'll talk about in a little bit what do you plug into that ethernet port my wi-fi when at two gigahertz and my wi-fi win at five gigahertz so i have five redundant connections to the internet with this mobile command center right out of the box that's a lot of redundancy now i promised you we'd talk about one additional type of wan source which i'm not using here which is a usb wan port now what a usb port does on certain select mobile routers is it allows you to tether a device like a mobile hotspot or in peplink's case they actually make small usb modems where you can add an additional connection via that usb port the model i'm going to show you today does not have a usb port but i did want to mention that is another type of wham so i know that was a lot to throw at you but the concept here remains the same like i said outside which is that our standard bundles at mobilemusthave.com specifically the ultimate road warrior bundle gives you that mobile command center or that center piece that can get you all of those options to connect to the internet now we're going to kind of talk about how you can configure those different wan sources to do different things like in the case for us right now we have it connected to starlink via that ethernet port before we get into the tour i do want to talk to you guys a little bit about a concept or a technical term called bonding and a concept or technical term called load balancing so we have all of those wan sources or internet connection sources at our fingertips with one of these command centers so we've got a lot of options to connect out to the internet now what a lot of people assume is that if you have five connections all connected to the internet all at once you're going to have this massive kind of perfect pipe to the internet that will work as one unified connection and this device can do that with a technology called speed fusion or speed fusion cloud which is a hosted product that peplink offers to combine all those connections but additional setup is required to get that working we have detailed guides on how to set up speed fusion cloud and these devices typically come with a license for speed fusion cloud that includes a terabyte of data which is a decent amount of data to get you up and running right out of the box with speed fusion now when you start to use bonding or connecting all of those connections together the technical way that works is you have to create a tunnel from your device to a data center and from that data center you go out to the internet and that's a vpn tunnel which peplink has branded speed fusion it takes literally about five minutes to set up speed fusion based on how easy peplink has made it through the interface it's not a big deal and we have detailed documentation on how to get that working but it's not for every single type of connection to the internet and i'll explain that now speed fusion is great for things like mobile work or connecting to voice over ip calls doing zoom calls or doing anything on the internet where you have a mission critical need to stay connected it can cause some problems with things like netflix or youtube tv or other streaming platforms because of that connection to the data center when you connect to the data center the traffic from like a netflix will show up as coming out of a data center in a different location than when you where you are now for companies like netflix they're legally bound to show you content based on your location and because of that if they detect that you're using speed fusion you may get an error saying hey please disable the vpn before you continue using netflix now that's not difficult to do it's covered in our guides on how to do it what we do for most of our customers and what i do for my setup is i have a network on my wi-fi that is configured to use speed fusion and then i have another network that's configured not to use speedfusion and for whatever devices i want to skip over the vpn connection and just use one of my wan connections they can connect to the other wi-fi network very easy just like anything else you just see two wi-fi networks and you connect to the one that you need to use based on the need okay so we've covered speed fusion or bonding now what if you don't set that up but you have five connections to the internet or five wan sources the router by default will use whatever is in the active priority on the dashboard and i'll show you some dashboard shots a little bit later and show you how the basics of this mobile router work and that'll kind of give you an idea of why we think it's such a great solution but keeping it high level if you have more than one connection or wan connection enabled at the same time the router will send traffic from say your desktop computer out one of the internet connections and say your tablet or your smartphone will go out a different connection and it will use whatever connections are available based on something called load balancing it's balancing the load of the internet across all the active connections the reason why that's important to understand is if you're just enabling five connections and say two of them are not very healthy like campground wi-fi maybe it's not very fast and you have them all enabled one out two out of every five times you go out to the internet it'll use those unhealthy connections and that can get really frustrating because you're like how come it's fast some of the time so load balancing is a really great feature but you have to educate yourself on what connections you have and if they're healthy or not you can do that very easily by running a speed test on a single connection by only enabling that one connection and then running a test to see if it's healthy or not and then simply disabling connections that are not fast enough for your needs the key here is that redundancy and that resiliency and that reliability right so we're talking about wow i have a lot of different ways to get connected to the internet i have a lot of tools at my disposal to make sure that i get connected but with something like this you also have to educate yourself and understand how these dashboards work and why certain connections may not be as fast as others so that you can pick the best solution to make sure you stay connected at each location now the good news is like i said up on the roof about 70 plus percent of the time i'm using my cellular connections as my default connection and this is a lot of the reason why if my cellular connection's working really well and i've got speed fusion enabled so they're connected and bonded as one single connection i don't really think about starlink very often it's there when i need it if my cell connections are not reliable and i can kind of see that i very likely have enough sky to get it up and working but it's not my primary connection so the good news is it's even though you have all this technology at your fingertips for the most part with our cellular modems enabled when we get to a location we find that the internet's working without us touching anything and it works pretty well but we do have those additional options to connect to wi-fi wan or to use our starlink if we need to on the front side here we see these ethernet ports that are both connected now one of those ethernet ports labeled wan like we talked about before we'll hop over to our starlink in the other cabinet which we'll show you in a minute the other port labeled lan or local area network is wired up to a network switch that's located in our central area that powers my desktop computer and other devices now for us we were actually able to utilize the factory wiring in the integra to connect all of the ethernet cables that were already pre-wired in the rv because we have touch screens and our net our coach was essentially already ethernet ready you can check with your manufacturer if that's something that you may be able to do as well as where the wiring locations are but if you don't want to mess with any of that you don't have to you can simply use the wireless network that is broadcasting from that mobile command center to power all of your devices you don't have to hardwire devices but if you can it's a nice touch it can be a little bit more reliable than relying on wireless only in this cabinet you may be asking yourself what the device behind our mobile router is that says pex m or pexim now that device is a sim injector and it is injecting sim cards meaning i can change out my sim cards inside my cab without having to go up on the roof now that's actually not in use right now because we've added the starlink the mobile command center we're featuring today like we said earlier has one ethernet wan port so we have to either connect starlink or connect the third cellular modem that we have on the roof via this sim injector but you know just wanted to explain what it is it's actually not in use right now because we're using the starlink but if you wanted to not do starlink you can add a sim injector and a third cellular modem to the roof so you'd have those two on-board cellular modems in the command center here in the transit pro and then via the wan port you could have a third modem up on the roof that's how a lot of people add 5g support to these setups if they're not interested in looking at starlink so again a lot of options but today we're just going to focus on how we've got this one wired all right so i changed up the camera angles a little bit to hopefully give you better views of what we've got going on here before we start one thing i forgot to mention is that all of the stuff that i showed you prior to right now is running and operating on 12 volts meaning it runs directly from my house batteries now why that's important is that i don't have to have an inverter on for my internet solution to work up until this point when we start to play around with some of the stuff in here i unfortunately need an inverter because uh starlink primarily has to run on 110 volt power based on it really being a system that's designed for residential or rural home use that they've they've done some marketing to say it's an rv specific product but unless you're going to build antenna masts and have an inverter and do a bunch of stuff it's it's a bit tricky but it's working so i don't want to bash it but it's it's uh it's it's a residential product we're using for mobile use so okay so let's get this opened up so i've actually taken a fixed mount uh tv mount that you see here and i've replaced it with a swing arm that has a lock so right behind the tv here there's a small cable it's a short one that you can't see unless you know you put your finger on it just a little strap and then that can unlock and bring this whole unit out and as i said before let me see if i can try to get around this accessibility and you know not having to see it is a key thing for me now again on that starlink component so i've got my starlink router here it's wired up to grab my inverter power from the same cabinet where my router is i had to drill a hole in there and put some nice cabinet grommets on there to make it look nice but that is where the wire goes you see this big mess of wire here starling ships with a 75 foot proprietary cable that you know unfortunately that means i've got 50 something feet of wire that i've got to hide somewhere it's not ideal i'll actually show you a picture right here of what this looked like before i added starlight and i hate to put stuff like this on videos because i don't like to share hey i buried 70 feet or 50 feet of cable in the cabinet but when all i can buy is cables that i can only buy from you and my only choice is to cut a cable and do some frankenstein to something that might void the warranty and probably will damage the device i i'm just going to wrap it up in here and hope that they build something a bit uh more modular for the future but behind here if you look kind of up here you've also got my cell booster that's my weboost cell booster that again it primarily only works for us we only really use it to boost our voice calls and the transmitter antenna is here um on this other cabinet i didn't show you before but it's just a small little table top antenna that transmiss the roof one is what we showed you earlier now why is it in this cabinet the main reason is because when i'm driving down the road in the rv my cell phone's very close to here so it will pick up that signal from the booster and allow me to do my work calls while i'm on the road so that works really well and in a pinch if i need the booster to work with the cell modems in the pep weave transit pro that command center i can unscrew that roof antenna and plug in these small little black stubby antennas that came with the router and just place it nice and close to that internal transmitter from the booster so that is something that can work we've got some articles on boosters versus roof antennas and as i said before the roof antenna is the way to go but in very very minimal situations i could technically remove that roof antenna and use the booster also um which you can probably see in this side here it's kind of tucked up in this corner is a ethernet adapter which is an option from starlink and with again those proprietary cables this gives me an ethernet out which i can then plug in to my pepwave transit pro command center here via a standard ethernet cable and that allows me to use the starlink via the wan port now you can use starlink via wi-fi wan meaning this starlink will broadcast wi-fi and the command center will pick it up and then it can become one of your five connections my problem with using wi-fi wan is i have a wi-fi transmitter here and i have a wi-fi transmitter here and in normal applications you really wouldn't want two wi-fi is transmitting so close together because they're going to create a lot of interference for each other so it works but i'd get that ethernet adapter if you're thinking about doing something like this and then inside the starlink app you can disable wi-fi and you can put this in what's called pass-through mode and basically what that means is hey starlink just act like a satellite modem don't do a bunch of router stuff because you've got the command center already doing all that so essentially what i have is the starlink's in in that pass-through mode and all it does is hand off the internet connection to the transit transit pro the command center in here to really manage my connections and that's how we get connected with our starlink as well as our cellular modems all right so let me get this all put kind of back away so you kind of see how this all works it's pretty modular and pretty fast and pretty accessible now while i'm doing this you can also notice in this corner that i have a modular fuse six fuse 12 volt fuse block there and i've taken 12 volt that i've tapped off of a cigarette lighter that's got plenty of amperage in the integra coach and i've run the wire up through to this area and then i've put secondary fuses in here for my transit and other devices that i use including that router up on the roof or i'm sorry that well it is a router up on the roof which is my third cell modem when i'm not using starlink but now i have it all fused all nice and safe and all in one location this little fuse box here actually will if a fuse blows it turns on a red light so i know which fuse is blown and we sell those at mobile mustang.com they're actually an option with our bundles and with our routers at checkout if you're interested in adding a little 12-volt dc fuse block you know it doesn't just have to be used for pep wave it can be used for anything we often use those all over when we're doing sort of projects and other fun things to improve our motor home all right so now we're in the back of the rv and i wanted to show you that access point the secondary wireless transmitter i talked about earlier so inside this cabinet with our clothing up top this is kind of where the factory wiring was in the integra for the rear of the coach now we found ethernet here that was controlling um it was controlling the tv remotes on the vega touch for integra and that like i said before it's all of it's all the same network with the ethernet so up here what we have here is an access point called the ap rugged now most of our customers will go with the apax lite because it has wi-fi six it's a little bit newer but for me what i like about the rugged is it has two ethernet ports on the front so what i was able to do is uplink with the blue cable from my factory wiring and then the second port i plugged back into the vega touch system so that all of the vega touch controls would continue to work but this wireless transmitter now broadcasts wi-fi in the rear of the coach another really cool feature about that command center the max transit that is in the ultimate road warrior bundle is it has a wi-fi controller in it and what that means is it can control secondary access points like this one so if i make changes to like my wi-fi password or anything else it'll update all of the access points all at once from that central command center so it's really easy to use some people ask us can we use off-branded or different branded access points with pep waves the answer is yes but it's a lot easier if you use the access point controller that comes with the ultimate road warrior bundle because everything's centrally managed it also makes sure that the access points operate on complementary channels so that they don't fight with each other and you get the best possible coverage one thing you might have noticed here with the ap rugged is that if you see up close here it doesn't have any power running to it so it's like how is it working without power it's using something called power over ethernet and that means that it gets the power from this ethernet cable and that's because we installed a network switch in our downstairs area that was pre they had a network switch in the integra uh we just replaced it with a better one that provides power all right so that's the physical installation for our internet so that mobile command center like we talked about before it gives us access to those five wan sources and we're using the ethernet wan to plug in the starlink and that gives us a ton of flexibility so that's physical now i'm going to pop over to my computer and we're going to log into the dashboard interface so i can show you how i manage all of this on a day-to-day basis if i want to change which of those when or internet connections i'm using to stay connected okay welcome to my kind of my mobile office here in the in the integra coach this is where i work from every single day so in order to access the dashboard for our peplink mobile router what we do is we go to uh connect to the wi-fi network on the peplink device always make sure you're connected and then we enter an ip address which will show below that's the link to get to the admin panel now you might pop up a security warning there saying hey i'm not sure this connection is secure but remember you're connected to your own device inside your own rv it's secure uh there's just no way to create a certificate out to the internet when you're not actually using the internet you're inside your own network so we're gonna hop over to the computer and i'm gonna walk you around the dashboard using my webcam here all right everyone welcome to my desktop here um let's see so in order to access a peplink router again first of all you need to be on the peplink wi-fi which i am so make sure you always check that step and if for some reason the page that i'm about to show you doesn't come up it's probably because you're not connected to the wi-fi so you can also connect via the lan port with an ethernet cable but that needs to be your first step now pep links by default are at this ip address when you're once you're connected to the local network 192.168.50.1 and you have to type it with periods just like you see here into a web browser now because i'm in the tech industry and i have to connect to a lot of different routers i've actually changed mine to 55 but for most people it will be 50 dot then you can go ahead and get to this login screen and log in the default username and password is admin and admin again if you get a security pop-up before this screen you can just click advanced and proceed and it will work uh fine to bypass that security message and if you want to get really technical and never see that message again in your browser you have to set this address to be a trusted site and then it will stop all browsers are different so google that you'll figure out a way to do that it's pretty easy to add a trusted site now before we get started i do want to mention a website which is guides.mobilemustaf.com and that will bring you to our setup guide section where a number of different guides exist including your standard basic mobile internet get started guides which show you how to do a baseline on both your public pep wave devices and the wireless network best practices guides those are there we also have some wiring diagrams and i'll reference in this conversation some more advanced guides like setting up speed fusion which are also linked in that link those guides are provided free of charge for customers and non-customers but however if you need additional assistance beyond those guides we recommend that you join that membership we talked about earlier at memberships.mobilemusthave.com then you can hop into the forums inside of mobile internet resource center including forums that i'm directly administering to answer more advanced questions that we might cover today so this is the dashboard of my peplin command center or peplink you know mobile router i keep calling it a command center it's not branded a command center it's just that's you know that's what it does for me it's the center of all of my internet connections so right here we've got our five connections we've been talking about are wan sources so i've got starlink i've got my cellular one my cellular two wi-fi wan on the 2.4 gigahertz wireless and wi-fi win on the five gigahertz now at any given time the connections that will be used will be the ones that are in the green status typically in priority one and you'll notice i have more than one in priority one i've got starlink cellular and these can be dragged and dropped into different locations now priority two connections that are in yellow or disabled connections if you brought it all the way down to here will never be used unless the primary connection fails so this would have to go red and then these would turn green saying hey my primary isn't working i've moved to secondary by moving multiple into primary it's using those at the same time and we went over that at a high level but essentially this is set up right now to be operating in uh via speed fusion so this is these are bonded connections together and the way i know that is because right here under speed fusion it shows that i'm connected now i'm not using speed fusion cloud but most customers will i actually set up my own servers in amazon web services but we highly recommend hop over to guides.mobilemustaf.com and use the speedfusion cloud setup guide to get your speed fusion working and it will look and act virtually the same except for you don't have to be an it guy and know how to set up instances in amazon web services which is kind of complicated so anyway as you can see here i've got my t-mobile my verizon and my starlink connected and those are operating if i go ahead and just kind of you know look around and see what's going on here i can also enable my wi-fi wan to connect to the wireless in my barn and i can change these around and that will take a minute to connect and then it will bring it to connected as you see here now i can click on wireless networks and it will show me all the wireless networks that are in this area i actually have to hit rescan here to show additional ones that will pop up in a second because i just re-enabled that but they will show you all the networks there we go that are in this area and i can connect to different networks based on what's available hey look this is a good example look the wan failed at starlink just now and i have a feeling that will pop back and become available in just a minute but something's going on around those trees like i told you about with starlink so this connection went down temporarily i suspect it will come back in a minute automatically the pep link will check if you look down here under details it'll actually show you health check method and it's saying that it's checking every five seconds and if it doesn't hear from the internet in five seconds it'll try three times before it marks that connection and failed yep there now it's back that's what i'm talking about where i say starlink is good but depend you have to have a lot of sky for it to work reliably now because i have speed fusion enabled right now i can actually do something to run a test here which i want to show you guys i'm going to click over to status tab i'm going to click on speed fusion and here's my links and it's showing green i've got starlink cellular cellular and wi-fi wan are all working this one is in priority two so it's yellow now i'm gonna go over here and expand and that's gonna show me all these connections and and pep link's done something great where they've enabled a speed test right in the device where i can actually see each of these connections through my speed fusion connection and run a test i'm going to click download because i want to check the download speed and i'm going to hit start and as you can see right here i'm getting pretty good speed starlink's megabits i got nine coming out of verizon i got five or six coming out of t-mobile my wi-fi is doing great and my total well my starlink dropped to one but my total if you look down here is doing very well 40 50 60 megabits now i might be able to improve this speed by by disabling certain connections that are slower but i'm not necessarily interested in having tremendously high speeds i just want reliability so by having multiple connections enabled and by using speed fusion to bond those connections together i have a lot of redundancy built into my connection in the rv so that's preferred to me i'd rather have 60 megabits like we see here 52 as an average as a reliable connection than only enabling starlink and maybe getting 200 megabits but then it dropping out all the time and causing me problems for work we can also do an upload test here let's do that and we'll see on this upload side what's going on and we see okay well the cellular one is not doing too well starlink's doing okay and our uploads overall because of all these combined connections is doing doing all right i'm getting 10 12 megabits which is a solid upload connection to give you guys an idea like a netflix hd stream would use like three to five megabits download we were getting 60 and if you were doing like a zoom call it was mission critical that'll use about 1.5 megabits so having uh 10 to 15 as we see here is more than enough for me to work and do everything i need but this little tool here is great and allows me to use the bonded connection in this setup but then also see what's going on with each of my connections i can actually click this checkbox here and disable certain connections so if i wanted to just test the starlink let me disable these three and it only temporarily disables them for 15 minutes for testing purposes and then i'm going to go ahead just test starlink and i'm hoping i get some pretty solid numbers here and we're doing okay 30 50 starting to climb 60 65 59 not bad not bad um i did move the rv back a little bit so that i could get some good test numbers from where it was parked before so i have a little bit more sky to play with but yeah i it's a little slower than when i had all the connections together but still pretty good overall so i know that's a healthy connection and i can actually go ahead and enable let's say cellular one turn off starlink and then test that connection and by doing this i can figure out which ones of my connections are the healthiest and use those uh optimally it looks like t-mobile is doing pretty good i'm getting 30s 35 36 not bad so this is some of the power that i have in the command center to see what's going on with my connections i'm going to go ahead and enable all these back just so that they're back to enabled and show you guys one more thing before we wrap up the next thing i love about this setup is my usage reports i can go into again the status tab and then click on daily and look at each of my sim cards or my wan connections and see my total gigabytes used up and down by day by hour or real time real time is a really nice view where i can see the aggregate transfer of my connections so if i'm having problems i can actually right here see how much bandwidth's being used and then scroll down and see star link in each of my modems independently to diagnose if one of my connections is having a problem causing me to get frustrated so that's a quick overview of my dashboard and why i think it's so powerful to have a multi-wan router as your central command center for reliable mobile internet all right folks so that's how we connect to the internet and hopefully it gave you a kind of a brief overview of all of our wan connections and how we stay connected with multiple internet sources as well as how we can administer them on a dashboard with a single place to get to everything now we find that this is absolutely the most reliable and trouble-free way to get yourself on to using mobile internet reliably now again like i've said multiple times in this video this is a long video that explained a very complex solution that most people don't need but that central command center that pat that peplink max transit pro device or really any of our mobile internet bundles that you find at mobilemusthave.com will include the core components that you need to get connected if you're a mobile worker like me that ultimate road warrior vr2 is a great solution because it's giving you some of the the redundancy with those two cellular modems but maybe you want a different bundle based on your needs there's a quite a few bundles up there and we have a bundle comparison chart that's available right when you click on the bundle page that'll tell you the difference is between all the bundles that are available thank you guys so much for watching hopefully you found this video helpful and informative and we will see you on the road [Music]

Channel: MobileMustHave

Views: 33,186

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Id: JtUztEjJ70c

Length: 51min 37sec (3097 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 19 2022