Rural/Off Grid Internet Solution | Mofi 4500 & Visible Wireless

hey guys welcome back to a little mountain life my name is don and today's video is all about internet i took the initiative in creating the internet specifically internet and in rural areas off-grid properties all that kind of good stuff so where we are in virginia we're actually not very far from washington dc about an hour and a half but we don't have good internet options up here on this mountain and we finally stumbled upon something that's really gonna be great for us and i think it's gonna be great for a lot of people out there that are in remote areas they only have the option of satellite all that good stuff so today we're gonna talk about two main things we have the router this is called the mofi 4500 we've been using it for over two years now and we're also going to talk about visible which is a wireless carrier that is tied to the verizon network so we'll get to the router in a second but first we're going to talk about visible wireless now visible we'll send you the card the sim card just like any wireless carrier would if you select the option to bring your own phone with you to the plan uh verizon att t-mobile they're all the same they all obviously want you to buy phones through them but they also allow you to bring an old phone with you and you just put the sim card in it's gonna be the same thing the reason why we went with visible wireless is because they actually use the verizon network they use the verizon towers and it's you know verizon is pretty much everywhere now and it's definitely the strongest signal that we have up here we've been using t-mobile for our phones and we love t-mobile they're really great we've been with them for over six years unfortunately the signal up on the mountain is not as strong with them as it is with verizon so that's why we want the visible you know just like anything else i researched this a lot on the youtube and saw a bunch of great videos out there i'm going to link at the video down below uh the first one is from nature's always right and he's actually normally like a gardening homesteading channel but he just needed to figure out a rural internet option and figured out how to use visible wireless as that option and did a great video talking about his experience with that he used a different router but he did use visible wireless and it's working well for him so far and it's worked great for us so far visible's wireless data plan is 40 a month but you can actually get it down to as low as twenty five dollars a month if you do this little party plan party i'll wait party on garth it's basically like a family plan that you would have with any other carrier but they call it a party and you don't have to be on the same plan you don't have to tie your plans together with the same bill or anything like that you can find some random stranger on reddit or whatever kind of forum and go in together you need at least four people and that'll bring your monthly plan from forty dollars down to twenty five dollars it's not as fast as it would be if you were a verizon customer but it's very fast compared to what it would be if you're using satellite internet how fast well let me show you uh really quick our download and upload speeds that we are getting right now on the map you can see we're using visible wireless but it's actually with verizon [Music] let's see let's do oh getting above eight there nine so a little bit better i think each speed tester website does different things um but here we are we're over 11 pinging at 12 now so you can see that's pretty adequate for download speed and then for upload i expect somewhere between 5 and 10. [Music] there are some nights where upload speeds are actually faster than our download speeds which is fine because we do a lot of uploading for our videos and for natalie's job it's right around five for the upload speed so that's not too bad let's do it one more time just to kind of give you guys an idea here we are we're still up 10 or 11. that's pretty awesome wow 15 16. that's pretty great and let's see what the upload brings oh we got up to 10 there for a second and about the same about five megabits per second upload speed just about where we were so obviously that is not verizon fios speed but we don't always have that option when we're living on a mountain in the middle of nowhere okay so we're going to take that it's enough for us to be able to stream on multiple devices it's not going to be in like 1080p or anything like that but we can all be doing what we need to do the girls can be doing their schoolwork i can be doing my thing and natalie can be doing her work out in the shed and it's fine it is fine for our purposes and it's a heck of a lot better than it would be for satellite internet which would be even slower and three times more expensive and this just happens to be a very affordable option that's working for a lot of people right now so that's everything you need to know about visible you can do your own research on that now we're gonna get back to this router now this router is the key component to all this working you can use different carriers t-mobile verizon sprint any carrier put the sim card in and it should work fine depending on your plan but this is what gets you by again this is called the mofi 4500 4g lte router it is considered a high performance business class router it's about 330 dollars depending on when you catch it on amazon i'm going to link that down below so you can check it out for yourself this router is a absolute beast there are others out there that are more expensive less expensive but we have had zero problems with this working as long as our service is good and i have heard of other people that try to do this with visible wireless or other carriers that use a different router and for whatever reason like the carrier finds out that you're not using a phone and they shut you down they will cancel your account but i've seen other people on the internets and on the youtube talk about this router as being something where they can use it without fear of their account being shut down so definitely look into this this router has two different kinds of antennas we've got the antenna here which is going to broadcast the wi-fi signal to your property to your house and this is going to be the 4g lte antenna and that's going to collect the signal that the cell tower near you is broadcasting out now we took these off you take them all off you can do aftermarket antennas we actually went with an aftermarket yagi antenna or yagi i don't know how it's pronounced exactly but we took this off connected it with the cable and we ran it outside to the yagi antenna outside of our house now the yagi antenna is much more effective it can gather a much stronger signal and we send that right into this router and then out to the property and we've been really good with that the yagi antenna is also directional if you just google it you can find ways to figure out where the nearest cell tower is for your carrier and now you're going to take the app and kind of check your download speeds and all that while slightly positioning to the left to the right to the north to the south the antenna to figure out where you're getting the strongest signal for us when we were using the t-mobile service we had our antenna pointed towards the south but again that was spotty not as reliable as we wanted it to be and we got the visible wireless which uses the verizon tower and we move the antenna to face towards the north because we have a tower that's much closer in that direction and we were able to figure out exactly where we got the strongest signal by doing small adjustments checking the speed small adjustments checking the speed until we got the fastest speeds that we could so you'll take your mobile carrier sim card stick it in the end and it broadcasts out the wi-fi but there's also the hardwired option if you want to use like a cat 6 cable or whatever and you have multiple ports here we run a very very long cat six cable all the way out to the shed where natalie does her recording in her office her her recording booth and she's able to get really fast and strong internet signal out there so guys again you got visible wireless a very affordable relatively fast and unthrottled internet plan pair it with the mofi 4500 router about 330 dollars it's not cheap but it does the job this setup is not for people that live in the city if you live in this city you have access to xfinity and comcast and verizon fios lightning fast speeds good for you for the people that i roll with all the homesteaders and people that live like to live out on property we just don't have those options hey guys check out this video over here it's our very first video from the mofi 4500 router and how we had to replace one that got burned up in a lightning storm and randomly if you like baby ducks check out this video over here if you want to see us hatch out the cutest little ducklings you've ever seen [Music] you

Channel: Little Mountain Life

Views: 62,193

Keywords: Internet, Wireless Internet, Rural Internet, Off Grid Internet, Visible, Visible Wireless, Visible Internet, Mofi router, Mofi, Mofi 4500, 4G Router, Country Internet, Homestead Internet, Homestead Wireless, Yagi Antenna, Wireless Signal

Id: Hc-FLZCDFvw

Length: 9min 1sec (541 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 14 2020