I Paused Starlink for a Better RV Internet Solution...The Insty Connect 5G Review

how's everyone doing welcome to the video today we are going to be talking about what we do for full-time internet on the road and that is this little guy the insty connect [Music] so this setup is actually pretty unique because not only is there a 4x4 memo antenna set up in here there's also a 4G and 5G Modem with two SIM slots and you might be asking why is the modem up here on the roof well apparently if you keep the wires as short as possible that's going to minimize signal loss and give the modem the best reception so then to wrap it up it connects to a category 12 router down in the RV via a USB cable and that's it pretty cool huh so let's get started so we've been using the NC connect system full time every single day for about three months now and we're going to cover off on the topics of the hardware the software the performance I'm going to cover a little bit on the installation process and then also maybe do some comparison talks on things like starlink my wife and I are full-time rvers for just about four years now and the quick story about how we have come to be using the instant connect system is we started out with just T-Mobile phones and using them as a hotspot to our laptops we quickly found out that was not going to work and we upgraded within about four months to a Verizon hotspot so a dedicated hotspot for our data that was a 4G LTE and it had an unlimited plan which we got back in 2019. now we bought the weboost antenna booster before we even hit the road and in anticipation for needing internet on the road and we quickly found out that there was a better solution than the Wii boost which was simply just a two by two memo window antenna that hooked directly to our hotspot and that's pretty much the system we used for about three years on the road and that was a pretty good solution it worked pretty much all across the country of course it didn't have any long range capabilities if you're really out in the middle of nowhere but then Starlight came along and we all expected starlink to be a game changer and if you've seen seen any of those starlink videos that we put out on the system you'll know that it was not a game changer for us it just did not work everywhere we traveled and we had lots of problems with the east coast and lots of problems with trees and obstructions and that's where Nick the founder of NC connect saw our videos saw the trouble we were having with starlink and said hey I think I have a better solution for you so he sent us out this insty connect system and said hey I want you guys to try it out and let me know what you think so here we are three months later and let's get into this review alright I am not the most techie of techie guys but I'll try to work my way through explaining what this package is and the hardware that comes with it so the NC connect 5G system is called the cloud wings and that basically consists of the rooftop antenna which is a 4x4 memo antenna as well as the router that's inside of that casing the specs on the modem are a 4G LTE n5g Qualcomm x55 modem and so you get a 15 foot USB a to USB C data cable and you can get a second cable if you need to which then connects down to the router inside your RV which has the 2.4 and 5 gigahertz Wi-Fi which is your long range and your high speed Wi-Fi and that's really pretty much all of the hardware and that's one of the great things about this system is that it is pretty easy to understand and to even install just because it's those three basic pieces next up let's talk about the software a little bit and this is something that's really really great about the system so before when we had our hotspot there really isn't much software it's the modem we had the antenna attached to it and if we got to a campsite and the sell signal wasn't good we basically would move it from window to window to window to try to get the best exception now what's great about the NC connect system is you get to go to a website which allows you to see many different stats about your system as well as change a lot of different things there's so much on this software that I don't even know where to begin but there's a few things that I have really used and that I really like about the system and first off is the tower band lock and so basically it shows you exactly which bands your modem is connected to on the different towers and not only can you see which Towers you're connected to but you can also change it there is an auto selection tool which basically just lets the system and the software pick and choose the best Tower that's out there and the best bands that's out there but sometimes you get into a situation between the 5G and the 4G and so you can actually disclude all of the 5G bands or all of the 4G bands so what's interesting about 5G is that technology is getting more and more popular like our Apple cell phone with T-Mobile has 5G when my previous phone did not and what I notice is is when it's connected to 5G and it has a really good strong signal it's blazing fast but sometimes it's connected to 5G and it seems like it's a little bit slower and I wonder if that is just where it should probably be connecting to 4G instead of that 5G signal just maybe because it's not as strong in this instant connect system you can exactly change that if you want to so you can eliminate the 5G and just have it pull in the 4G bands and they're speed testing and all different types of stuff you can play with when you get to whatever particular area you're at if the signal isn't working very well so that is something that is a really cool feature in the advanced section of the software there is so much that you can do I again don't even know where to begin but something that I have used is the real-time graphs and if you go to the traffic tab it shows you exactly what your speeds of outbound and inbound data is so speed tests are one thing but with this real-time graph you can actually see how much data you're either downloading or uploading so it's a really great visual feature to kind of see exactly how your system is performing because speed tests are great and they give you a great indication of how it's going to perform but this actually shows you the exact megabits and kilobits that are coming in and out of your system it's pretty cool from the instant connect software you can also do other things like software updates and reboot your router if you need to which is a good handy feature especially if your router is mounted somewhere like ours is underneath our fridge cabinet and it's a little bit hard to get to so here you can just reset it or reboot it with a click of a button Nick has a few videos that kind of Deep dive into some of this stuff and explain it way better than I do so I'll link all those down below so you can check them out if you're really interested in seeing more about the details of the instant connect system so let's talk about performance that's probably one of the biggest things that we need to discuss and right off the bat when we installed this in Minnesota back in July we saw speeds that were absolutely crazy like 163 megabits down over 40 speeds uh up which was just outperforming our starlink and it was just something that we've never ever seen before from our Verizon cell service so I think the main reason is because the NC connect is a 5G and 4G modem whereas our old Verizon hotspot was just a 4G but you can really see where these speeds kind of come from this 5G G network and one thing that the NC connect system does is something called carrier aggregation which is where it actually locks on to multiple bands and gives you the best possible speeds and signal so it's pretty easy to say right out of the gate we were we were pretty pumped and excited the the speeds coming out of the system were were just amazing now I want to share the other side of the coin and not just show you the Blazing fast speeds of the system but as soon as we left Minnesota we went over and down towards Indiana and we were in a location on the northern part actually pretty close to the border of Michigan and I think we were just miles and miles and miles away from any cell phone tower because reception there was really bad and again we couldn't even bust out our starlink system because we happen to have too many trees on our site so I was excited to see how this system was going to perform especially having the rooftop antenna up there and the speeds we saw were anywhere from one to five megabits download speeds they're really really poor and we had a lot of cell tower congestion I think most noticeably was at night around maybe seven eight nine o'clock when most people are trying to maybe stream TV that's when we usually do and with the NC connect system we were able to stream but it was a kind of pausing buffering and it was it was really really slow so I wanted to do a little experiment and I took the SIM card out of the NC connect system which is kind of a pain because it's up on the roof but thankfully you don't have to do it that much and I put it in our Verizon hotspot and then used the memo antenna on our window just to see what kind of speeds we'd get out of our old jet pack and to my surprise the speeds were almost exactly the same as the NC connect system so me neither one was picking up anything more than the other one and like I said I don't think there was very many towers around this area so there was maybe one or two bands I think I could see on the NC connect system and I'm sure everybody was just connecting to those but what we did notice the big difference was with the jetpack while streaming at night during that area of congestion it actually stopped completely it would buffer and spin and just wouldn't recover so the NC connect system was somehow able to either use the aggregation or a lock onto the band maybe it was doing multiple bands at the same time but it was just able to get a little bit better reception where we were able to stream at night and sadly this was kind of our first stop after installing the system so I wasn't that familiar with the band locking technology and the switching of the Bands so I kind of played around with it just a little bit but I had no idea what I was doing so I kind of wish I could go back and and try it a little bit more now that I'm familiar with the system and see if I could possibly get a better signal with the NC connect so moving on from Indiana we went South pretty fast through multiple States heading down to Louisiana and that's really where I noticed how well the long range Wi-Fi antennas from the system worked while we were driving I was able to use my laptop connecting to the NC connect system that's a good 40 feet away or so and this is an area I've just really noticed the NC connect system does really awesome is when we're driving around traveling we've traveled thousands of miles since and it just has a really good signal while I'm working while Chris is driving we've maybe been to a half a dozen or more different locations since installing the system and it just works everywhere we go so much so that I actually paused my starlink service last month I still want to have it as a backup but I just don't see us needing to pay that 135 dollars a month and uh it's nice that you can pause it we're still headed out west which is going to be fun to do some more remote testing out there as well as getting maybe the starlink back out too so comparing the NC connect system to something like starlink can be kind of difficult to do but from our experience it has showed speeds just as fast as starlink and the ability to have it running all the time and not worrying about setting it up like you do have to have with starlink for us that makes the NC connect more of a main system for us and the starlink as a backup really these two systems together are going to cover a huge area for us to be able to travel in and that's pretty exciting and I do think Nick said that he is working on integration uh for starlink and instant connect to kind of work together I don't know how far along he is on that process but I would imagine uh starlink's gonna get more and more popular and the two working together is going to be a pretty good thing so there are a few other 5G routers out there on the market like the pep wave or peplink and the Mofi and I just don't really have that much experience with them a lot of people do have those types of systems with the rooftop antennas the seven in ones which give you memo antennas Wi-Fi antennas and GPS antennas so one thing with the NC connect system it is just a 4x4 memo antenna Up on the Roof there is no Wi-Fi or GPS up there which is really fine with us because we do not and have not used Wi-Fi really anywhere as we travel we prefer to make our own Wi-Fi and have our own secure network as we travel so if you do have the the pep wave or the Mofi or the older systems or some of the new 5G ones I'd love to hear what you think about out yours and maybe now that you've seen some of this how you think it compares to the insty connect system because they're similar but they are a little bit different okay next I'm going to give a brief overview of the installation process and overall it is a fairly easy installation it comes with all the directions you need to do it yourself and there's really only two main pieces of the rooftop antenna and the 5G router and of course along with the USB cable that connects them and the whole process took me just about one afternoon to complete we ended up putting our router underneath the fridge by the electrical panel and ran our USB cable from the rooftop antenna down the fridge vent usually that is one of the hardest parts of an installation process like that and that is getting the cable run from up on top of the roof down inside and a fish tape can help guide the wires through any chases or vents but of course you can do an easy temporary set up as well running the cable through a slide or a window the antenna itself can be mounted with an optional stand and screwed down to something permanent but I wanted to avoid adding any more holes into the roof so I found the ladder to be a super simple and perfect place to secure this with four heavy duty zip ties and this thing hasn't moved an inch in thousands of miles of travel keep in mind the SIM card goes into the modem on the inside of the antenna which is accessed through a bottom cover the ladder on our RV is only located a few feet from the fridge vent so this ended up working out perfectly and we only needed one of the 15 foot cables just a month prior I had replaced our propane fridge with a 12 volt one so I had already eyed up this location to run the wire for this install and I ended up removing the fridge vent cover and did have to make a small hole for the cable to run through the wire mesh I was able to just drop that wire down perfectly below and behind the fridge behind the fridge there was already a hole and that allowed me to drop the cable further below into the cabinet and down conveniently by the electrical panel and the 12 volt fuses now for the router all you need to do is screw on the four Wi-Fi antennas plug in the USB cable from the antenna and provide Power now it does come with both 120 volt household plug so you can just plug it right into any receptacle and I thought about that for a moment because I did have an extra Outlet where our old fridge was plugged in but we do like to do a lot of off-grid camping so we try to convert everything we can to 12 volt power so besides the cable from the roof the other part that was most difficult for me was hardwiring the router to the 12 volt so the router does come with a 12 volt pigtail and it had like a fork style connector and that was not going to work with are set up so I had to figure out a different way to get this spliced into an open spot on our fuse panel I ended up using a crimp style end cap and the biggest problem was the wires from the pigtail were an extremely small gauge so I did have a little trouble cutting stripping and splicing them into a much bigger gauge wire but overall it wasn't that hard it just took a little bit of finesse and time to figure out in a nutshell that's pretty much it for the installation process and we chose to do it this way to have the Wi-Fi running 24 7 as we live in this RV and also drawing the least amount of power which is only about one amp per hour and if you compare that to something like starlink which is probably more between four to eight amps per hour it's a really big difference okay my final thoughts I really do like this system it's easy enough where it runs on its own and you don't have to change any settings or do anything when you get to a new location or any thing while driving but it's also Advanced enough with its software that you can monitor change and tweak things if that's your jam and the most important part is that it works pretty much everywhere we go and at pretty fast speeds so if you've been looking for a new cellular solution for internet on the road I would recommend checking out this NC connect 5G system and Nick has been so kind to offer our audience five percent off the system with the promo code Irene iron all one word in lower case so feel free to ask any questions you might have in the comments down below we are full-time rvers this is our primary internet source on the road and we are using it every single day I'll also link the instaconnect website down below as well as Nick's YouTube channels I love that he and his family are a small business big into rving and helping people stay connected on the road thanks again for watching and we'll see you on the next video [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Irene Iron Travels

Views: 116,683

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Id: 5SItxqWksgI

Length: 19min 30sec (1170 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 06 2022