Insty Connect Explorer 4G12 First Look: Roof Mounted Cat 12 Modem & Antenna, Interior Router

we're going to take a first look at the instaconnect cellular integrated router and angel wing system put out by a fellow rver to serve the rving community hi i'm chris with the mobile internet resource center here to give you a first look at some interesting new hardware that is just now coming to market this is the insti connect put out by nick of we can explore it another youtube channel they've been on the road for several years as part-time travelers and got frustrated with the mofi our cellular integrated router they were using and went out to design a system of their own and are now just now bringing it to market and we've got one of the very first ones to get some hands-on time with and well we're taking a look at it today now what makes the institute interesting is it is um basically they're they're off-the-shelf parts you know source source from china but he has put together a bundled package that is actually kind of unique with some custom software on top of it to address the needs of making things uh relatively simple and relatively affordable for the capabilities for specifically targeting the rv market so what do you get in the insta connect kit well it starts off with uh indoor routers it's actually pretty hefty little um metal uh very solid quality feeling a router that is a 802.11 ac wi-fi indoors with a 4x4 memo for your indoor wi-fi so here's the um wi-fi radio so you have it's actually two radios a 2.4 gigahertz a wi-fi radio and a 5 gigahertz wi-fi radio supports a wi-fi five 802.11 ac is the wi-fi standard it supports not wi-fi six so it is one generation behind but not a lot of cellular integrated routers have supported wi-fi six just yet um and then four gigabit lan ports across and then a usb port here that is for connecting to the outdoor category 12 cellular modem and so rather than have the cellular modem inside the router and then have antenna cables going to an antenna on the roof where you lose a lot to the cables instead he's 3d printing these custom angel wing antennas that go up on the roof and we'll be able to mount them on a little stand like this or you could probably pull mount it as well um comes with the stand like this to attach to your rv roof and inside this angel wing antenna it's a two by two nemo it's got two angled for better catching signal and better memo diversity antennas inside of here and then a modem module that goes outside so the modem the actual cellular modem will slide into here you put your two sim cards you know two different sim cards although it's only one modems only one is active at a time put the sim cards in the hair hook up the antennas rip out the antenna hook up the antenna slide it all together and um then it is connected to the indoor component and powered over a very long usb cable so this means there's no loss coming down from your roof to the indoor router so that's actually the smart way to do it we've been advocating you have your your radios on the roof and your your router indoors is a great way to do it and up until now that kind of gear on the roof like the weingart connect us either really low end modems or really kind of high-end out-of-consumer pricing here like the um pepwave hd1 dome and such so either higher end or lower end roof amount of stuff now we're actually getting a real cat 12 modem with some pretty advanced cellular capabilities that would go into this so we're quite intrigued to see how well this performs um and so that is the first generation of institute it is a 499 dollars for the bundle includes power supply for ac power and or direct wiring to dc power everything you need to set up the antenna roof mounted on your roof and all of that and put the system together and then later in the year they're saying late summer he's going to have a second generation institute system that will be using a cat 20 slash 5g modem with quad angel wing so i wonder if it actually might look like a christmas tree with antennas coming out in all four sides but a 4x4 memo antenna on the roof and a 5g version and that will be 9.99 so that's the kind of the hardware pieces of it all it's a lot of hardware for the price um eager to see how well it actually performs and how most importantly how easy it is to manage and configure and this is where nick says he's got some special sauce that we'll be checking out in just a few minutes with software that lets you lock the modem to different cellular bands so this is one of the the tricks that only a few cellular routers allow you to do easily of saying hey you know i'm on a t i only want to connect to firstnet band 14. ignore the other bands you kind of then maybe find the fast band that gets you better performance or you know other carriers you might be able to experiment try different bands and he says he also has the ability to see which cell towers are in range and force the modem to lock to a particular cell tower which is another way like if one tower is congested even if it's got a stronger signal the modem is always trying to connect to the congested tower with enough trial and error you could say well no go connect to the weaker tower that direction and um by forcing that at the modem level that might actually introduce a lot of interesting capabilities so he says he's made some really easy software to control this and we'll be taking a look at that next this theoretically will be more waterproof in the final version [Music] angel wings so we've been playing around with instaconnect and have had setup and the user interface is indeed incredibly minimalistic just focused on cellular connectivity so you bring it up and you see your primary sim and your secondary sim you can switch between them very quickly see your signal strengths and then that's about all you can do you've got a speed test button you can configure your local wi-fi networks just by setting the name for that and then all other advanced features are hidden behind the advanced config geeky button which opens up the normal the full open wrt open source firmware that is hidden behind the scenes and is definitely not a normal user friendly or approachable so that's the important thing to keep in mind here is the institute is it is very focused on just the basic task of taking a cellular connection and sharing it out through the router all the more advanced stuff is um not really part of this product or this bundle um the other special sauce you do have is that you can then simply when you've got a cellular connection up you can go into a locking interface here as you can see what bands are currently detected in the area and press a lock key to lock on to a particular cellular band or tower and so far this feature is very promising but it is definitely rough around the edges on this initial release that we've got so we're hoping that this improves now some quick concluding first thoughts on the instaconnect it is a promising package it's a lot of capability for the price we love that the the modem is integrated outdoors where you know modem belongs you got minimal loss over cell cables and stuff but it is also very important to keep in mind that the instant connect is a very limited product it's focused on doing just one thing which is taking a cellular connection letting you tune it lock it in and share it it doesn't have more advanced features like being able to use an upstream wi-fi network um for your connection like the upstream campground connection it does not have the ability to combine connections in any fashion doing load balancing or bonding or even failover if one connection goes down automatically switching to the next and it doesn't have any sort of uh advanced um local network management like keeping track of how much data you're using and what devices are doing various things now a lot of that capability is actually baked in deep under the hood in the open wrt open source firmware that is underneath the institute interface and you can get to that if you know what you're doing and dive deeper in and are comfortable kind of you know tweaking and rolling your own firmware and perhaps over time insta connect will expose more advanced features in their own interface and officially support them they do have actually plans to have a vpn service that they're going to have as a subscription coming out probably later this year so there's some interesting capabilities here but it is not um you know this is a small company just now launching um by rvers but focused on the needs of our viewers but they don't have the um big breadth and uh uh hardware experience of a company like pepwave but that company like that wave is catering to a much broader market that not to the rv market so this is a interesting device definitely something to keep an eye on we're going to be putting it into testing over time um and getting more experiencing with it we'll be sharing about that in our member forums there are also a lot of other interesting cellular integrated routers coming to market in 2021 this is going to be a very interesting interesting year for connectivity as we start to transition into a 5g world and more advanced cellular routers do start to come out so we'll be keeping a close eye on the instaconnect and are excited to welcome this new company to market and we'll see where it goes from here these videos are brought to you by our premium members our mobile internet aficionados they make it possible for us to track this news and create these videos if you like this video please give it a thumbs up leave a comment subscribe to our channel or better yet consider becoming a member yourself

Channel: Mobile Internet Resource Center

Views: 16,623

Rating: 4.9068413 out of 5

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Id: 036AkYK90r0

Length: 10min 15sec (615 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 12 2021