RV Internet with the MoFi 4500

hi it's jerry with iloverv life we're continuing to make improvements for our rv workspace and i've got a new product to try out well it's a new product for us have you seen these this is the mofi network 3g 4g router oh this thing is cool [Music] well hi it's jerry today i'm going to talk about a new improvement we're going to be making to our workspace and that is going to be this new mofi networks 3g 4g lte modem let me briefly just go into why we're going to be making this change we spend a lot of time on the road months on end and this year we're planning on spent extending that even more and i have to take the business on the road can i use wi-fi that you find inside of a campground well for me the answer is definitely not it depends on the type of business if all you're doing is sending you know basic emails word documents that type of thing a pdf that might be able to work for you but for me that will not work i have to have a substantial amount of bandwidth because i'm doing web development graphic work and a lot of video editing not just for i love rv life but i do a good bit for clients as well and as a result of that i'm having to download raw files i'm having to upload finished products and they're very very large and i don't want to spend hours and hours on end waiting for something to finish downloading to load youtube or to send it up to dropbox or a google document or something like that so i need bandwidth you've heard me speak about this before we play a day work a day or work a morning play a afternoon those types of things and what i don't want to do is just be tethered to the desk for hours on end waiting for files to make sure that they're going to upload or download time is money time is fun so i want to be able to have a good reliable environment so i have been using why wi-fi for cellular for quite some time now let me just briefly go into this we have plans that we're currently using that are grandfathered and these plans don't exist anymore but does that mean that you can't get good plans out there to be able to conduct business the answer is absolutely yes you can if you are a business and you have a federal tax id for a reasonable price now let me mention this to you from the date of this video these are the plans that are available now um three days three months three years from now if you're watching this video these plans may not be available and something else may have you know supplanted them so at this stage this is what we have but again there's a good att plan out there that you can get a hundred and gig 100 gigabits again you have to be a business you have to have a federal tax id and you can get that for 85 dollars and that at t plan is really really nice and it does cap at 100 gigabit and the split speeds slow down but 100 gigabits of data is a phenomenal amount of data you could use that depending on your type of business both for some entertainment as well as your business needs t-mobile has a fairly good plan that's out there that's about 50 bucks you want the t-mobile service you know again just like at t we'll have some spots that it will not work well but in a lot of areas it will work well and then verizon has a number of plans and they just move all over the place i think currently right now you can get a prepay for 30 gigabits on a hot spot what's a hot spot this is a my old tried and true i've been using this thing for five six years now this is a myfi 6620l um there's a 8800 that a lot of people are using now i don't even know if you can buy these new anymore you can buy them reconditioned this thing's been a solid rock for me and was using it up into just a couple weeks ago before this mofi came in and i started testing it so good a little hot spot it does have its limitations uh the upside uh you can connect up to 10 devices that and it's battery operated so you can you know throw it on the dash of the car well you don't want it to get too hot but you can throw it inside the car and and go down the road with it and use it inside your you know truck or your car whatever you may have and then we use it in the rv as well here's the downside you notice there's no external antennas there is a diagnostic port on the side that you can hook up an antenna but it really doesn't work that well the other thing is the wi-fi signal that comes out of this was really made for you know sitting down at your desk and having your device connect to it from that standpoint so you know just the distance from here in our living space into say the bedroom the quality of the wi-fi signal drops pretty quick so i'd say within 10-12 feet it's pretty dead gum good but after that it really starts going down pretty pretty bad now why do we want to go up to another type of device this is the box i'm not going to do an unbox reveal here but this is the mofi networks it's a 3g 4g lte router it works on all bands reported i've tried it with att i've tried it with verizon sim cards works like a champ understand from looking at reviews it works well with t-modal t-mobile and then there's other conversations about it working on other networks as well hit or miss couple things that you need to understand people talk about taking their phone sim cards and putting inside these may work may not most the time it will not if it comes up it's only going to work for a short period of time sometimes again it's kind of flaky it's not what it's designed for you're really designed to be using this with a traditional internet plan for a device something like this but you don't have to order this i took the sim card out of this and just within seconds i was able to get the unit up and i'll show you how that works here in just a minute so a couple things that i want to show you this is up and going right now i'm going to go ahead and look at the internet status and currently it's showing a signal of a negative 110 and a signal to noise ratio of a minus six i'll state this about where we're parked right now the cellular service here stinks it's terrible so i am going to attempt to make a connection with this it's up and going i think i've got if you really want to look at it i think i've got a bar on this device right here then we'll get the mofi going what i will not be showing you today is hooking an external antenna up to that i do have one on order for when we get into fringe fringe areas but now i just want these devices to stand alone so let's look and see how this thing is going to work okay before i get started again i am going to be using this jetpack this 6620 just to show you the type of connection that i have here you'll notice i'm using the old tried and true speedtest.net and i'm you can see i'm currently connected to verizon here and i am going to hit go and we're going to see what kind of a speed test that we can get here uh first thing that you'll notice is the ping is pretty low and speeds are not that great we'll let it go ahead and finish up here quickly so we've got a download speed of 3.71 and interestingly enough about verizon we've got an upload speed uh hovering a little over four let's see where this finishes up we've got an upload speed of 5.2 so that's actually from where we're sitting right now that's doesn't sound like that's very good but for the poor service we have here uh that's actually not too bad well let's look at the mofi network device now first of all let me share this with you i bought this this is not a sponsored video i purchased this myself and i've been seeing and talking to other folks who have used it with very very good results so i thought i would give this a try it's not an inexpensive unit but when i think you see the features that you get if you want to have that higher class a higher feature ability with both wi-fi and router and cellular connectivity i think you'll see the benefits of this as we go forward comes in a box like this i've seen several things that was in the amazon comments that people raised an issue hey the box had been opened up and was not in the original you know factory wrappings or something like that well here's what i found this is actually ordering this off amazon it came out of canada and there was all this paperwork that came with it and one of the first things that was right up on top was this is a brand new unit we opened it up we tested it we made sure it had the latest firmware before we sent that to you i thought that was a nice benefit so we did notice that when we checked it it did have everything that was current and even though the box had been open and resealed i couldn't tell that it had been used it's it's a brand new unit the second thing they provide us with are these um this is a newsie or nosey it's different uh adapters for you to be able to put your sim card this requires a full-size sim card and there are larger and smaller units that can go in here i'm using a micro um the the sim card adapter looks like that you can see the little clear space right there where the sim card goes in and they provide you that as no additional cost it comes with a a wall wart for a power supply there is another power supply that you can buy that is dc regulated which i think is very very interesting we may go that route at a different time we're going to just kind of test it out like this for now but that way if you do not have any ac power or you don't have like an inverter or something like that in your boon docking there is a regulated power supply that gives a constant 12 volts to this unit so you don't have to worry about spikes and things like that damaging it it's a little pricey but it's probably worth it if you're you know a big boondocker doing in needing this type of service okay now looking at the unit i'm not going to do a big product unveil because this thing is pretty basic you'll notice here there's two types of antennas these are your wi-fi antennas and these paddles are your cellular antennas these are this actually came with the kit and i'll be providing a link for this kit that you can buy these are called ultra wide band 4 g lte and lte 2 antennas it's a higher gain paddle antenna and i think some people from the comments i don't think they may have installed their antennas correctly because uh these antennas are specific uh one of these and you'll not be able to see this in the video but for the ones that go on front and the directions are very very clear on this and if you put them in the wrong spot uh you'll either damage the mofi unit or it just won't work because you've got the wrong frequencies on the antenna so that's very very important on the back they show you you know where these are supposed to go there's pictures with all the documentation and it's honestly when you get this thing out it's seconds to be able to install these antennas just put the right antennas in the right place i know i went long on that but that's very very important second thing is there is a slot here for the sim card and again you have to use the adapter for that so let me go ahead and put that in just so you can see i'm using the you know the same plan for my verizon i'm going to take the 66l and take it apart get the battery out of it and i'm gonna pull the sim card out here these things are teeny and you can just see how small that sim card is it's a little bitty and then i'm gonna put it in the adapter it only goes one way and it kind of snaps inside that adapter like so and it will only go in here one way there's actually a picture on the back here of how it goes this actually has a cutout on it and it snaps in like like so and we're going to hook power up to it and we're going to get ready to go here okay so i've got the mofi connected uh you'll see i don't know if it shows up in the video there's some little green lights showing you know power um cigarette connectivity and wi-fi whether it's you know wi-fi is working and it is put this in about the same spot that i had that 6620l hotspot uh one of the things that i'm using today is the laptop just to kind of keep it a little bit quieter so let's go ahead and run a test here and see what's going to happen okay i've logged into the network this is the mofi 4500 you see that here and i'm logged into the internal modem section looking at signal strength i've got 64 percent that's gosh substantially better again this is just with internal antennas that little paddle over what i had with a little hot spot which i think is running you know like 1 10 11 12 something like that 110 112 negative so it's not bad not bad okay let's um let's see what we can do here as far as getting a speed test and see if this is any better as well this is now on the mofi 4500 ping speeds are not fantastic but the download speeds are really great i can live with that that's a substantial improvement over using just that little uh 6620l hotspot that's pretty dead i'm good i'm pretty pleased with that and then upload speeds are a little bit better that's not terrible i can live with that we're you know a little over five here it's getting better getting close to six oh yeah yeah we can live with that we can actually work with that okay i'm pretty pleased with that so again this is just using the device as it is you know nothing fancy here just um just plugged it in turned it on and checked the signal status and set it here on the desk that's pretty awesome well i hope you found this video to be helpful this device this mofi device is really an advanced tool it's got a lot of features that you can use that are just basic automatic you can plug in make it work for those of us who work out on the road for extended periods of time need bandwidth need additional features need things like direct connections to our pcs those types of things this device is really really beneficial i look forward to hooking up an external antenna i got that thing ordered and we'll see if we can get even some better speeds while we're in this terrible internet connection cellular connection area it's just terrible but maybe we can get some better speeds and then i'll uh add that to the video at a later date if you're just the casual traveler you know just getting something like this that i was showing you earlier you know you just turn it on it works it has its limitations but it also has its benefits simplicity is one of those benefits and again this mofi device can be simple as well and if you need the advanced features by going into the menu and you know doing things like searching for different channels for different cell towers and those types of things to improve it or just having um you know just the ability to hook up multiple devices is another big benefit as well so it does have its benefits as well and i'm excited about having that and adding that to our arsenal of business tools while we're nomadic and on the road and doing something like that well these types of projects for me are fun i enjoy doing those i enjoy sharing them with you as well i hope you found this beneficial and if you did give me a subscribe give me a thumbs up because i love doing this yeah you're absolutely right i love rv life too [Music] you

Channel: I Love RV Life

Views: 8,240

Rating: 4.9683795 out of 5

Keywords: ilovervlife, Jerry Neal, I love rv life, rv travel, 5th wheel travel, rv living, rv mods, rv modifications, rv upgrades, 5th wheel mods, 5th wheel modifications, 5th wheel upgrades, 5th wheel living, camper life, rv internet, mofi 4500, wifi for rv, wifi for campers, rv internet options

Id: f3bW5RUp2Ww

Length: 18min 51sec (1131 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 20 2021