How We Get Rock Solid RV Internet! - The Best Tech Solutions to Work Full Time From the Road

hello everyone welcome back to the channel today i'm going to be talking about rv internet how to stay connected in your rv or while traveling on the road whether to work remotely or just stay connected we're also going to be sharing our particular rv setup that we use to work remotely from our rv anywhere that we go [Music] at the time of shooting this video we are in our sixth year traveling full-time in our rv and working from the road having internet has been very critical for us to be able to stay connected and continue working while we travel and it's been a bit of a learning curve figuring out the nuances of how to stay connected on the road before i share our particular setup i want to talk a bit about the different means that people do use to get connected while on the road and it's going to depend a little bit whether you're working full time or you're just trying to get connected while traveling which method might work best for you now the first and largest primary means that most full-time travelers and those needing to stay connected on the road use is cellular data cellular connection is the same connection that your phone uses to talk to the cell towers and we all know that we can get internet on our phones but there are particular plans and systems that can take this cellular internet and make it much more user-friendly for a wider application to connect to your computers and all your different internet needs these cellular connections can be as simple as turning a hot spot on on your phone that creates a wi-fi network that your computers can connect to to as complicated as what we're gonna share our setup looks like with fancy modems and routers that can suck and sell from many different sources all at once now the second primary means that people use to get connected on the road is wi-fi service now wi-fi service usually comes from a hardwired location at a campground or a coffee shop and you can get close enough to those wi-fi access points as they call them to connect your computer or even a router or booster installed in the rv to basically reach out and connect to a wi-fi point that might be a little bit further away using wi-fi service is great because a lot of times it's included as part of your stay or it's free at coffee shops however it's not necessarily as reliable as a cellular connection because sometimes the wi-fi might just be crushed at a campground too many users on it and it's not working well or the inconvenience of having to go to a location to actually use that service because of these limitations wi-fi is not usually used by full-time travelers as their primary means of connection but it's great as a backup next up in getting connected on the road is satellite internet now satellite has been around for quite a while but most of the times we are talking to what's called a geosynchronous satellite which is 22 000 miles away from the earth because of this you need a very precisely pointed satellite dish to actually talk to that satellite which means this is not a reliable means of data say while going down the road what's great about satellite internet is that you can get it most anywhere as long as you have a clear view of the sky for those that really need connectivity when they are going to be so remote and far away from anything satellite may be the only option a big drawback to satellite internet is that it's usually the most restrictive meaning you have very strict data caps or when you can use it and it also has a very long latency which means the time that when you send a request out for you to get the answer back now at light speed any point around the earth that happens pretty quick but when we're talking 22 000 miles that round trip time can really increase latency which can make holding a phone call or a video call almost impossible via satellite internet now i'm talking first gen satellite internet here with geosynchronous satellites however second gen technology or constellation technology is currently being implemented this is things like starlink or oneweb and these satellites are going to be at a much much lower orbit these constellations also use thousands of satellites that are constantly moving over the earth which means that you're not going to have to point a dish at one particular spot in the sky so a constellation internet system might be a viable means of internet in the near future for rvs however at the time of this video we're not quite there yet now the final means of getting connected for rvers is the hard-wired connection this is not ideal for having connectivity on the go because well you can't drag a wire behind you but it is a possibility for say a longer stay when we're at our seasonal rv lot in florida we have gigabit fiber pulled to the site and we can hook up to that for blazing fast internet now we don't actually use this because our cellular connection is so good but if we ever needed that we could hook up to it getting a cable modem or hooking up at an rv park is also an option a lot of times so hard wiring into an rv might be possible and might be a solution in a place where connectivity isn't great otherwise and you really want those blazing fast home type internet speeds in your rv now that leads into the next question that we get asked a lot which is can you actually get high speed internet in an rv and the answer is gonna be that it's gonna vary significantly it's gonna vary based upon the equipment that you have the location that you're in the conditions that you're in the cellular plans you have or wi-fi boosters you have and how you put it all together if you have everything put together correctly and have a good robust system that's working well it's not uncommon to see speeds in the 50 to 100 megabit per second speeds which are pretty equivalent to what you'd see in a residential home internet most of the time however seeing speeds around 10 to 20 megabits per second is not too uncommon with lte internet wi-fi and satellite internets can also see speeds in these ranges but again are going to vary significantly while these are very usable internet speeds it's not uncommon to end up in situations where you're struggling to get two megabits per second however these might be really remote locations or just cellular towers or wi-fi networks that are congested or don't have the bandwidth to actually support decent internet now all that basically comes back to it can be pretty tough to get connected on the road you really have to kind of play with what's available and what's right for you at the time we've been on the road for almost six years now and we have had 12 different data plans trying to figure this out when we started out things were very different 3g cellular connection was still the primary means of getting connected and we had an unlimited 3g plan that we were using a hotspot on a phone since then advances have come in different cellular connections different cellular plans different antennas and routers and modems that we can use on top of that cellular carriers keep merging and buying each other and changing new satellite internets are appearing so it's something that's constantly changing but we've currently got a pretty good system that's been functioning for us really well for the past two years i don't doubt that this is going to need to change at some point but we're pretty happy with how it's performing so i'm going to share with you what we use to get internet on the road which enables us to work full-time upload videos and in general be pretty heavy users okay before we get into our setup we need to talk about the two primary sides of how you get connected there's the hardware side and there's the software side the hardware side is going to be all the equipment that actually talks to the wi-fi or cellular networks and then the software side is going to be the actual data plans that you use to get connected first we're going to talk about the hardware side or what we use to actually talk to the cell towers and the heart of the system is located in this cabinet right up here in this compartment we have a pep wave transit duo cat 12 modem now this is a very fancy piece of equipment and it really is the heart of the system because it's what actually talks out to the cellular networks it talks to wi-fi networks it produces our wi-fi network and it acts as our router which means that all the data goes through it and we can route where we want the data to go now this is kind of a complicated piece of equipment but we can boil it down to think of it sort of like a fancy cell phone your cell phone has a radio that enables it to talk to the cell tower and so does this unit it actually has two hence duo in its name what we do is insert our sim cards for the data plans that we want to use into this modem and it reaches out and connects to the cellular provider this unit doesn't just take one sim card but it can actually take four and it can run two of them at the exact same time this means that i can have a t-mobile plan and an att plan and be connected to them both at the exact same time this enables the router to do fancy things like upload on one or download on the other it can figure out which one's more congested and use the other one and it does this all simultaneously and in the background so when we're watching netflix and uploading something it's just doing this all on its own and we don't have to think about it if we want we can log into the router and see exactly what it's doing and even change the parameters of when it's supposed to use which cellular connection which is pretty awesome and this helps to figure out what's going on if one connection's not working well but for the most part we just let it do its thing and it works really well remember i said that it has four sim cards the two additional sim cards are basically backup cards that it can switch over to either automatically or manually so you can actually have four different cellular plans installed in this modem all at one time this modem also acts as a wi-fi router and re-broadcasts the cellular data as wi-fi in our rv so that our computers can get connected to it in addition to broadcasting that wi-fi it can also receive wi-fi this unit can actually connect to say a campground wi-fi and then merge that data into our primary wi-fi so that we never have to actually sign in and this new wi-fi network with all of our different computers we just have to sign into it via the modem and then it will bring that data in and rebroadcast it another magical thing that this modem can do is that it can do something called bonding now bonding is when it actually sends the data back up to a server up in the cloud somewhere and it combines all the different data streams that you have say you have two different cellular connections and one wi-fi connection it can bond all of those into one big pipe and give you a more secure solid connection from one wi-fi output this is some really cool technology that those who need the absolute best connection can utilize but we've found that it's not completely necessary and just having all those different connections and having it bounce between them provides pretty solid internet now this pep wave is a ruggedized unit was originally designed for law enforcement ambulances buses and even military applications so it doesn't really look like anything too special but it is a very solid rugged little box that has traveled all the way to the arctic ocean with us now when we got the unit it came with a bunch of antennas that we still keep around for certain applications however what's neat about this unit is that it has external ports that you can connect external antennas to the modem has two antennas per cellular connection which is called a memo system or a multiple in multiple out which enables it to be able to broadcast and receive at the same time with minimal interference between the antennas we can install all the antennas directly on the unit but then it's going to be limited by where it's installed it's going to be inside and it's going to have to talk to the cellular connection through the walls so what we recommend and what we've done with our unit is we've actually installed a roof mount antenna that has a much higher gain and of course since it's on the roof it's outside the rv and has a much clearer path to talk to the cellular and wi-fi networks outside the antenna that we're currently using is the parsec husky seven in one antenna this unit is a round unit that has seven different cables going into it it has four cellular connection antennas two wi-fi antennas and one gps antenna because the pep wave is a mobile unit it has gps capability so that you can actually track where it is we found that the husky antenna on the roof performs extremely well it does a better job of actually picking up cellular connection than say your phone could and it also has a better wi-fi range because your wi-fi transmission from the pep wave is actually up on the roof so you're broadcasting around the rv and picking up wi-fi from greater distance with that antenna now if you've seen our trip north to alaska you may have remembered that we installed these antennas on the roof this is a pointing antenna and it has a set of five different connections on it that we installed and connected to the same router that we're currently running in our fifth wheel these were great antennas and we are planning to reuse them however the husky seven in one was a little bit easier to use and i think it has slightly higher gain compared to the pointing antennas what's neat about this device as a whole is that it can be connected to all sorts of different antennas so if better antenna technology comes along or say you need a different antenna like a very directional antenna you could just hook it up directly to the router now most of the time this on the roof system with the memo antennas gets us pretty darn good connection however there are circumstances where it still doesn't quite get us enough we're on the very fringe of service and we need a boost that's where our cellular booster comes in we use a weboost drive reach cellular booster that we connect to an external antenna that we mount on a pole on the back of our rv this is a very directional antenna meaning it needs to be pointed directly at the cellular tower to perform best with the combination of boosting that antenna on the roof we can usually get connected to a much much further away or weaker service than we could even with the memos on the roof while it works the performance is not as good because all the data is going through this one device and one antenna so it's not memo or multiple in multiple out anymore but sometimes if it's the only option it's better than having nothing now to make the boost work we need the outside antenna to talk to our modem and how we do that is we actually replace one of the antennas the one that we want to boost primarily on one of our cellular providers with a simple candy bar antenna that's this little antenna here we run this antenna down to the inside antenna that we connect to the booster and we actually just put these together and it may seem strange but we then wrap them in aluminum foil the reason that we do that is it helps shield the boosted signal from the cell booster which all it's doing is taking the service from outside amplifying it and putting it inside the coach and it helps shield it from the outside antenna because if the inside antenna talks to the outside antenna it can actually cause a loop in that boosting system and that's why cell boosters can be really finicky to get set up sometimes but we found that shielding these in aluminum foil enables them to talk together really well and send that signal up to the router however it helps prevent that oscillation that we call it to the outside antenna now as i said this will get a service in those really remote places but it's not as good as using the memos so we always try to get the roof antennas to work before setting up the booster the booster is also a bit of a pain because it's not a permanent thing installed on our rv and we have to set up the pole we run a cable a long 50 foot cable in through a slide seal in our rv we run it in connect it to the booster and hook everything up it's also difficult to figure out where to point that antenna sometimes it takes a lot of swinging and trying speed tests to figure out where your best speed is going online and trying to figure out where the cell towers are and getting it lined up sometimes it's just a few degrees that make a huge difference in the speed overall cell boosters sometimes can get you serviced when nothing else will but they can be a bit of a pain and sometimes it's easier just to move so that concludes the hardware side of our setup but what about the actual data plans that we use now unfortunately a lot of the plans that we currently have are no longer available and this is where things are pretty tough to figure out what's the right mobile internet cellular connection for you because plans are constantly changing the one thing i can recommend is definitely have a back up cellular plan if cellular connectivity is your primary means of getting online this is because the plans do change so regularly and you might not have service on one carrier versus another verizon as a whole tends to have the best coverage across the entire united states however its speeds can sometimes be pretty poor at t is probably second best in coverage but provides excellent speeds compared to verizon and t-mobile being the slightly less coverage has the fastest speeds we've noticed as we've traveled we have unlimited data on all three of these plans and can bounce between which one works best for us we have an unlimited att data plan through mobile must have that is our primary data source and a secondary t-mobile internet plan that we got through nomad internet however they no longer offer just the sim cards and those are the two primary plans that we run in our router now remember that our router can pick up wi-fi signals and re-broadcast them so we actually run a third plan and this one is available and it's called visible it is a prepaid verizon service that has unlimited data however at slightly lower speeds we use an old phone as a hotspot that we then broadcast a wi-fi network that the router picks up and then re-broadcasts so that we have three cellular connections operating all at the same time now these are our three primary data plans however we actually have an older unlimited at t data plan that we hang on to just as a backup and then we also use our personal cell phones that have data potential and hotspot potential as well just in case everything else goes down my personal phone operates on google phi which does add one more carrier option that is not available from the three primary carriers which is u.s cellular google phi is great because it also operates internationally i can walk into any country and my phone will say welcome to the country and automatically work with the same cost as here in the u.s google fi also has a cap on how much you will spend so it's in essence an unlimited plan as well combine all these plans together mix them in with a fancy modem and we get pretty solid internet from all these different plans now as you might have guessed none of this is cheap and you're definitely going to spend more for a system like this than on a hardwired home internet system if you're looking to get connected for less plans like visible can actually act as a decent connection and won't cost you near as much however keep in mind that you might not have service on that compared to a different plan so overall this combination of hardware and software or data plans gets us pretty solid internet everywhere that we go we're able to work online hold video calls upload videos and pretty much do anything that we need to online with pretty reasonable reliability that being said cellular connectivity is not always there and there have been circumstances where we have struggled with internet in our travels and that's going to lead me into the last topic that i want to talk about which is planning around connectivity we strive to see pretty much everything and some places just don't have connectivity so what we like to do is look ahead and read reviews on places like rv trip wizard or compendium where people have left reviews of what the cellular connectivity is actually like now we have pretty high gain equipment and we keep that in mind because the person may have just been checking on their phone but if they say that there's no cell service at all we kind of take that to mean there's no cell service at all and we just plan that if we're going to go to that location we're not going to stay as long because we're going to need to get connected again so we go we explore the area and we keep on moving on with decent planning we found that we've been able to stay connected really well in our travels we in fact traveled all the way to the arctic ocean for the go north expedition and we stayed connected surprisingly well throughout our travels there were significant stretches where we had zero service at all however we knew where we were going to be able to get service and when we got there we were able to get a lot of work done for that go north expedition one additional consideration we had to make was we were traveling through canada and if you're going to be traveling into canada or mexico you might have to consider that your us-based plan might not work we knew this and we got an international data plan that worked really well in conjunction with the google phi phone that international data plan was offered through mobile must have at the time and as i said data plans come and go and currently they don't offer that plan however mobile must have has been fantastic to work with and we have got all the hardware that we've talked about here through mobile must-have these guys are really knowledgeable about their products they can answer a lot of technical questions and they've been really really good at getting us hooked up and answering all of our questions so that we have reliable internet on the go these guys have provided us with a coupon code that we are able to pass on to you to get five percent off your order if you're interested use motm5 at checkout to get five percent off anything in their store now i've talked a lot about rv internet and our particular setup here but truthfully i've just scratched the surface there is so much to know about this stuff and if you really want to get a comprehensive understanding of mobile connectivity i highly recommend that you consider taking the course mobile internet explained over on rv masterclass the course is presented by andy murphy from where wild ones roam and rv internet is his job so he really knows his stuff i've actually gone through this course and have learned a lot myself he does a great job of explaining it in layman's terms i'm going to go ahead and put a link to mobile must have in our five percent discount code below as well as the rv master class mobile internet explained course well there you go now you know how we stay connected and how we uploaded this video as always thank you so much for joining us here on morton's on the move and we'll see you down the road you

Channel: Mortons on the Move

Views: 134,986

Keywords: Full Time RV Living, RVlife, how to live in an RV, rvlife, mortons on the move, rv solar

Id: 5nU4p9dNudA

Length: 25min 3sec (1503 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 12 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Alittlescared78]

In terms of plans- how much do you average spending on sims/data in a month and how much Gb would you say you normally use in a month streaming/ working?

[u/Alittlescared78]

In terms of plans- how much do you average spending on sims/data in a month and how much Gb would you say you normally use in a month streaming/ working?