Netgear Nighthawk Questions Answered Rural Internet Update | Geek Out

geek with the tractor here and i am going to do an update video on the netgear nighthawk m1 and i have just floored it how popular the first video was and i got a number of questions uh through the comments on the video i answer as much as i can but i felt that it was time to do an update video and and maybe explain a little bit more about what i did and the the plan that i have so you can take a look at the link in the description and the little little link card here that is uh the first video you can take a look at kind of the reasons why i did it in summary i live in rural america and the internet uh the the infrastructure for internet is just terrible all we can get was dsl i had to get two dsl lines and that was before i started a youtube channel which required a lot of uploading of videos and that kind of thing and with a family and then of course when covet hit a lot more a lot more going on online with zoom chats and and whatnot and the dsl just was not cutting it so i began doing some research to find out what we can do to get better internet out here i came across this device here it's the netgear nighthawk m1 and there are a few different version models i'll talk to that in just a moment and i actually called a tnt because what i originally did was doing was getting an ipad and i was going to just use it as a hotspot but i found out that it has much smaller limitations bandwidth limitations and it was more challenging to get pull in the signal and what inspired me to actually to go this route was i am on my phone plans i'm on verizon and on the verizon this particular spot where we live we live in a valley here and it's beautiful valley but it can't pick up a verizon signal for anything we had a friend come over that had att and he was pulling in a pretty good signal on his phone so i looked into hot spots and that that's where i actually talked with a support person at att they suggested going this direction i guess what i'm seeing in the comments and i'm kind of seeing the chatter on forums and things if you go direct and buy this from a t and this is what i tried doing original initially they will they will kind of push you into the path of buying a plan for the netgear nighthawk and that's fine but i i noticed that there was like a 15 gigabyte hotspot limit or something like that however on like an ipad plan uh the with the getting a sim card for the ipad it was like 50 gigabytes so what i have is the unlimited extra plan and i got it specifically in the context of a sim card for the ipad now the three different sizes of sim cards the ipad sim card has a nano uh sim card and that is actually smaller and i'll show i'll do a close-up and actually take this apart for you so you can see that it's actually a smaller sim card than what this one has this one has the uh the micro sim card and now you can get little adapters to put the nano sim card in and actually slide it in perfectly i didn't bother because i got i got it in i said well let me try it and i just popped it in and i'll show you that in a moment but i wanted to show you something i don't know if you can see that you see there are 11 devices connected to it right now i think it goes up to 20 devices and i have one day left and i've used 361.2 gigabytes of bandwidth this month in this plan and there is a note on like the plan that says after 50 gigabytes the the speed may be limited on during high usage times but out here in the country we really don't experience a lot of network high network usage we've not i've not had a problem with it but like earlier today i uploaded a high definition um short video to youtube was about i think a little over gigabyte and a half maybe closer close to two gigabytes and it uploaded in maybe 20 30 minutes something like that if i was on dsl it would be hours you know to upload a video like that so huge huge difference it's made a huge difference and what i've done is i've actually connected it to a netgear booster so that booster actually broadcasts it out over the property so i can get i can play like pandora down in the garden and things like that and without without a problem and it's really amazing so i've i've connected that to the booster and that's really helped out a lot all right so this is the the front and what's amazing for the compact size it has really really good uh reception and i'll talk about that here in just a moment but i'm going to go ahead and pop this off and the nice thing about this is because it is battery operated of course you can plug in plug it in as well but battery operate operated means i can take this even on the road if i need to or and i've done that before and it's been extremely handy so pop the battery out and you'll notice here that the sim card is a bit smaller than what the casing is here so i'm going to slip this out here there we go and you see i could i just have a a hold on a nano sim card now notice this number right here the mr 1100 1 in a s now i'm going to bring up a web page here and i'm going to show you what model i have here compared with some other models here in just a moment but you can see even though it's smaller i could just kind of slip this in there it's a little i'm just kind of make sure it's straight there and it works perfectly fine you pop it back in there we go and just kind of snap this back on and then power it up and you're good to go so this is the chart i was wanting to show you here you can see the list of different models here and mine is here is here at the bottom also if you recall you could you saw the att logo on my device it is actually locked to at t and you know for me that's fine because i know that you know verizon doesn't work here on our phones works great when we travel but for our purposes here the att router does work um fine and so i did see in my plan where i can unlock it and you'll notice here that the bands of 2 and 4 and i think 66 there's there's some bands here that actually are the bands that verizon's network network works on so technically this particular model would could work with verizon if it was unlocked you can search and you can find some models that are unlocked like this one here the 100 nas for north america so there would you would need to do a little research to see which one works for you and what your neat particular needs are but this is this is worked excellent for our purposes out here in rural america somebody asked can i use a an iphone sim card i don't see why not because the iphone sim card is the same nano form factor that's used in the ipad so i don't see why you couldn't work use that now how that works with your particular plan and the device you would need to to research that i think the most important the most important thing is you just need to make sure you have a hot spot plan on it and definitely if you're going to go this route you definitely want to have unlimited you don't want to have a plan that is restricted in gigabytes because you will go over when you use this device is it still working absolutely absolutely yeah i've been using this for a few months now and i think this has been the most bandwidth 300 and what did i say was 361 gigabytes of usage for the month it's been the most we've used but on average i'd say it's anywhere between two to 300 gigabytes a month and so far we've not had a problem we've had as many as you know well you saw there was like 11 devices connected to it we've had kids who uh play some intense has have played some intense video games network type video games over it and didn't seem to have an issue so definitely still working what about services third-party services like nomad i really can't speak to that except that in the comments on the previous video on this nighthawk netgear people there was mixed reviews i want a number of people who are using nomad without an issue had one person comment and say that they um actually uh nomad told them that that a t the att network is no longer supporting the nighthawk netgear devices so i i don't know you would have to just contact them and talk with them about your particular area or particular needs to find out just to clarify i i bought this separately i bought this online through best buy and so that i didn't i wasn't forced into a purchase a nighthawk netgear plan because what i've also heard is some people will go through the and get the netgear nighthawk planned and they're limited to like the 15 gigabyte hotspot mine is limited at what says 50 there's a limitation after 50 gigabytes which is a significant difference and of course i go over it every month without a problem there's no extra charges or anything like that and you know i think uh with taxes and things like that it ends up being like 55 somewhere around 60 bucks a month after taxes uh so well worth it for the amount of speed that we get uh the download speeds are anywhere between 20 to 50 um megabits per second and then the upload speeds can be anywhere between you know depending you know we i've had as high as seven megabits eight megabits per second it averages probably anywhere between five you know five to seven megabits per second another important thing to do is to make sure you find where your signal remember you have to pull a towers in just like on your cell phones this is pulling from a tower signal so you want to find out uh where your spots where good hot good spots are in the house to pull in the signal and to get the best signal i have a window there and a window here that seemed when i set them there that seems to do really well i earlier uh this summer actually was walking around the property just to see where i could get the best signal there's like a spot out towards our driveway where i was pulling down 50 megabits per second upload speeds was like 10 or 12 megabits it was really pretty amazing um but here in the house i get only two bars and that's another thing i saw in the comments uh which might help be helpful to note uh this device seems to do better with low uh no low bars um than a phone does and maybe it's because it's it's static you know it's not moving around a lot you just kind of sit it there and you know it's not having to constantly reconnect whereas the mobile devices you're moving around i don't know it that seems to make sense to me but i know with two bars i am still able to do a lot of work and get really good speeds uh that being said i am going to be investing into an antenna on the bottom here there are little places here that you can poles that you can actually plug in uh antennas into so i'm going to be getting an antenna to help grab the tower signal better and hopefully get it up to maybe three or four bars which will will improve the latency or you know it'll be less latent in its connections and be more stable so i talked about other frequencies people are wondering you know does this work verizon this particular one because it's locked to 18t it does not work with the horizon unless i go through the steps to unlock it it does have the technology to uh to work with the bands that verizon works on but again it it's locked to 18 team which is not a problem for me and there are particular versions that you saw as you saw in the mo earlier that do work with uh verizon uh what about the the dual band this one does broadcast um it broadcasts like a router itself although i do connect to my booster which is uh it's basically a router on speed um but this here broadcasts both the 2 gigahertz 2.4 gigahertz and the 5 gigahertz bands for um for your for your devices to connect now what is the 2.4 gigahertz what's the 5 gigahertz thing one thing to be very clear you you will see like listed on the device broadcasting 2g and 4g are 5g rather that is not the same thing as the 5g network coming from the towers that 5g represents 5th generation this 5g represents gigahertz so big difference um one is for your local network and the one is for the tower um you know mobile network that's that's that the signal's coming from so what's the difference between 2.4 gigahertz and five gigahertz well when you're on to the the five gigahertz is a faster and more powerful uh broadcast so uh but because it's a higher frequency it doesn't go through long throw through objects very well so if you have a static objects like a tv or maybe maybe speakers or something like that anything that's static or within the same room of where the the router is then 5g would be the better option because you're going to get better speeds if you need to do longer distance or you have connect you're connecting with a mobile device that's moving from room to room or it's in a in a room that's far away then you will want to connect on the 2.4 gigahertz that was a little bit of a tangent but i know a lot of people get confused about that and so i hope that helps guys i know real internet in in north america and probably other many other parts of the world perhaps uh is frustrating and i know it's been frustrating here but but i have found something in the netgear nighthawk that has really worked well for our situation i know each of your situations may be different all right well that's it i hope that this this video has been helpful for you and informative and i wish you the best on your journey to get better internet here in in your rural situation i will leave links to this device in in the description so you can have access to that they will be amazon affiliate links so anything that you if you purchase this device or anything else you purchase within 24 hours of clicking on them will give me a small kickback financially and i appreciate that very much it helps support this channel so until next time geek with the tractor keep tracking [Music] you

Channel: Geek with a Tractor

Views: 40,810

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Id: HhqU0mkM-kg

Length: 17min 58sec (1078 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 22 2021