- It's been two years since
our last internet video. And we know that two years is a long, long time in
the technology world. A lot has changed since then. Namely, we've got 5G now
is a lot more prevalent. We've also got Starlink,
which is really, really cool. So today we're gonna get
into how we have used those new technologies, and our internet setup for
very reliable mobile internet. I can't believe it's
been two years already since we upgraded to this guy right here. This is our Peplink
Pepwave MAX Transit Duo. Obviously, you can see it's
not hooked up right now because it's been
replaced with an upgrade. We're gonna get into that. Per usual, these kind of videos tend to run really, really long. I like to include as much as I can without going too far into the weeds, so it's not a two hour
video, but it may be long. So we're gonna have this
broken down into sections, and we're gonna have links
down below in the timeline where you can actually jump
to a particular section if you want to. The sections that we're gonna cover are a mobile internet overview
from basic to advanced. I like to include those just
so we kind of have a level set for when we talk about some
of the more advanced topics. We're also gonna jump into
data plans, and how data usage, and the type of usage
that you do affects those. Then we're gonna get
into our current setup. We're gonna go through all that gear, and equipment and antennas, and all that cool stuff and
how we use it currently. Then I'm gonna jump briefly
into some multi-line topics, and how you can use more than one line to increase your reliability of internet, including things like
failover and bonding, and all that cool stuff. Before we jump into it, I
want to give a shout-out, and high, high praise and recommendation to the Mobile Internet Resource Center. This is rvmobileinternet.com. We'll have a link down below. We're not affiliated with them in any way. I just really believe
in what they're doing. If you're not familiar, this is Chris and Cherie from Technomadia. They've been on the road for
like, I don't know, 15 years, something crazy like that. And they've got a bus
and a boat and a van, but they have really lived
and breathed mobile internet that entire time. And they created this resource, and they now have a whole team of experts that are creating content,
and constantly researching, and finding out what's
coming out, what's new, they're constantly testing. It's just a superb resource. Now they do have a free section on the Mobile Internet Resource Center, but they also have a paid version called Mobile Internet Aficionados. I highly recommend that. That's where you can get to
some of the premium content. When you do join the MIA, the
Mobile Internet Aficionados, you become part of their,
what I call alert system. They don't call it that,
that's just what I call it. I call it that because it
alerted me to when AT&T was about to cancel their
AT&T unlimited plan. I forget what it's called, but they were going to change
to a hard throttle plan. And because of them, I was able to jump on
and lock in that plan. I've had that plan now locked
in for the last four years. And thank goodness I did, but my point here is
that their newsletter, their alerts will make sure you stay on top of
everything mobile internet without you having to stay on top of everything mobile internet, 'cause quite honestly that's impossible. Another thing I really
love about their site is a mobile video course they have now that will actually take you
from the very, very beginning, and kind of build, build,
build on your knowledge until you have a good
understanding of mobile internet, 'cause it's a very complex topic. A side note on those guys. We had them on our "Carpool Lane" Live a couple of months ago as Technomadia, but we're gonna have them
on in a couple of weeks, and we're going to jump into
all this mobile internet stuff. So if you have questions
as I go through this, of course, put 'em down below, but maybe also queue them up for our Live in a couple of weeks. Of course, we'll be announcing that on our community tab and social media. So keep an eye out for that, but that's gonna be a good time, and we're gonna get through a
lot of information with them. Throughout this video, I'm gonna be throwing
out some terminology. So I want to get some of
that out of the way up front. So you're gonna hear me
say things like MIMO. MIMO stands for Multiple In Multiple Out. And that really refers to a modem's ability to talk to a tower on more than one frequency
at the same time. It basically allows like, it's like picking up four or
five handsets at the same time being able to talk all at once. The more connections you
have the better throughput, and things like that. So you're gonna hear that term MIMO. You're also gonna hear
me talk about LTE and 5G. LTE is basically 4G. You could think of that as
just the fourth generation. You might also hear a term called LTEA, which is just kind of
an advanced form of 4G, which allows for carrier aggregation. Again, as they improve these technologies, and give 'em new names you
just kind of build on 'em. 5G is just the latest fifth generation of mobile internet technologies. And, of course, that's just, there's no other fancy
names for that it's just 5G. I also want to touch on
data speeds and terminology when we're talking
about bits versus bytes. A lot of your speed testing apps are gonna measure things
in megabits per second. Whereas, a lot of your data plans are gonna be measured in
megabytes or gigabytes. Now the difference here is a bit is a single tiny one or zero. And that's one little bit of information. A byte is eight bits. So whenever you're trying
to convert between the two, you might be doing a speed test and think, okay, I'm running this
speed and it's 10 megabits, how fast will that eat through
my 10 megabytes of data? So you kind of wanna be able
to understand the difference between a bit and a byte. A bit is denoted with
a small b, lowercase b, and a byte is denoted with an uppercase B. So whenever you see mb small, or MB big, it's megabit versus megabyte. Another thing you're gonna
hear fairly frequently when you're talking about
mobile internet is latency. And sometimes you'll
see this as like a ping. And what I mean by that is latency is the time it takes for
a single packet of data to leave your computer,
go wherever it's going, Google, whatever, and then come back. Usually this is measured in milliseconds, or one thousandths of a second. And you might think, why
would you care about that? Well, when you load a
webpage, for instance, that really comes into play because it's not just one request going out to get that, right? When you say, I want to go to netflix.com, your browser first has to
go and request netflix.com. Who is that? I gotta get an address for them. It has to get that back. Then it has to go to Netflix and say, hey, I wanna load your webpage. That webpage is gonna come back, and give a bunch of information. And then it's gonna go
and look for other sites to get all the images. There's quite a few connections involved whenever you're just
doing something as simple as loading a webpage. So that latency if it's large, can make a difference in
how fast your page loads. Another thing that's not really a term, but is going to come into
play as we talk about all these different things
is wired versus wireless. You're gonna see a lot of
these things where we have, inside your RV, where we
got a hotspot, or a phone, whenever something is wired, it's always much, much
better than wireless. So we're gonna see some
things where we talk about connecting this to this
wirelessly and wired. Wired is always better. So let's talk about a bit of an overview of the types of internet that you can have when you're on the road in your RV. I'm gonna basically be going through our iteration of upgrades as
we've done through the years because we've done this ourselves. We've started out really basic
with hotspots and moved up. So let's start there. The first thing is your phone, but your phone is a good example
of a really basic hotspot. If you've got that ability
through your data plan, and through your carrier,
your phone, basically, it connects out to the
cellular world, right? Through its antennas to the
cellular tower down the road, and then it broadcasts Wi-Fi. And then you can connect
to that from your computer, from other phones, things like that. And you can basically
share the connection. That's a really basic hotspot. Now I mentioned wired versus wireless. A lot of your phones, you can plug in your little
lightning cable here, plug it into the USB on your computer, and you can use it that way. That's called tethered. What it does is it eliminates
that one wireless connection, and one point of potential
failure from radio interference. A step up from that would
be a dedicated hotspot, not a phone, but something
like this, or this, or this. As you can see, we have several,
we've tried out several. We've used several. This is a NETGEAR hotspot
that came with an AT&T plan. And this is kind of an advanced
version of using your phone. This is dedicated and
designed to use as a hotspot. And it's the same idea. It's talking to the mobile towers, and it has a Wi-Fi hotspot built into it. So you can connect to it over Wi-Fi. Now some of these allow you
to tether connect over USB. Some do not, but the
idea there is the same. Additionally, one thing
you get with one of these that you won't get with your phone is a lot of these have antenna ports. So you can use something like this, which is a two-port MIMO antenna, stick it to your window, and it can greatly improve your reception. For that matter, you can take this whole thing
and stick it in your window. Chris and Cherie talk about, I think it's called a soap dish upgrade, or something like that. You get one of those little
suction cup soap dishes, stick it on the wall, pop this in it. And that way it's sitting
right in your window. The next step up from that
would be something like this, a hotspot with a dedicated router. Now this is our old Wi-FiRanger. They don't sell this anymore. Wi-FiRanger company still
does sell one like this. I think it's called the Spruce, but the idea here is this now becomes your hub of connectivity. This is your Wi-Fi. Whenever you connect to your Apple TVs, or phones or computers, or whatever to your Wi-Fi
they connect to this. And then this in turn through USB connects to
one of your hotspots. The advantage there is if
you do have multiple plans, which we do highly recommend
because mobile internet is all about having multiple options. It's all about diversity of connections. So we've had these kind
of things for a long time. This is a Verizon hotspot, but the nice thing there is
as you swap out hotspots, you're not having to go
around to all of your devices, and change their Wi-Fi connection. Additionally, the Wi-Fi in these, the quality of it is
usually quite a bit better than in some of these devices. These guys, whenever we would
connect to these directly, I would have to reboot them sometimes a couple of times a day, just to kind of reset their radios, and get them to work better on Wi-Fi. Sometimes the Wi-Fi in these are good. Sometimes they're just not that great. Another advantage of a device like this is they typically have built-in ethernet. Now I mentioned wired versus wireless, no different here, right? I also wanna talk about boosters. Now we did a video on one a few years ago, and since we upgraded to this
and got an external antenna, we have not even gotten the booster out of the box down there, but basically what a booster does, it's good for very specific situations. but the idea here is
whenever you have antennas receiving a signal from a tower, the higher you can get
this in the air the better. So you're not gonna stick this outside, but you might be in a situation where you're far away from the tower, and you've gotta get your
antenna up on a pole. And that's what a booster does. It has an antenna on a pole outside, and then it comes into a repeater. And then you've got an internal antenna. All it's doing is taking
your signal from that tower to your devices inside, and acting as an intermediary, and taking the signals from way up high, rebroadcasting them inside, taking your signals from inside, rebroadcasting them out on the antenna. So it works really well for
very specific circumstances when you're far away from
the cellular antennas. The big problem with boosters
is they're single channel. So you might have this guy here, that's got four antennas
and all this MIMO, LTE advanced carrier
aggregation stuff built into it, and you connect it to a booster, it can actually degrade your performance, if this thing is already
receiving a signal. We've seen situations where somebody has a
booster set up all the time, and that's simply not the way to go. A booster a lot of the time, while it may give you
a much stronger signal, might decrease your actual data throughput because it only has one channel, but that is why we have
not used our booster in about two, maybe three years. Now, the next step up from
that is something like this. This is an integrated cellular router. In fact, this has two modems in it. I didn't mention the term modem, but modem just stands for
modulator-demodulator, basically, allows you to
talk to other systems. It's a very generic term, but when I say modem in this sense, I'm talking about a cellular modem that is designed to talk
to a cellular network. The advantage of having
a built-in modem is you're not talking from
one device to another, like you are with this. It's all integrated right in here. Additionally, most of
the devices like this have the option to put in
multiple SIM cards for each modem, meaning with a click of a button. I can change carriers without having to
actually swap out things, or swap out SIM cards, so super easy carrier switching. Also, some of these like this
one have more than one modem. Some have one, and I'm
gonna show you one of those in a minute, but the nice thing there is
it can do automatic failover. If AT&T has a hiccup and goes down, and you're also connected to Verizon, it can switch over automatically. Even the single modem units like this can switch over automatically,
but it's much slower. You'll also notice that this has ethernet just like these guys so you
can connect directly to them. This particular one has
one LAN and one WAN port. LAN is just your local
network, local area network. And you'll usually
connect this to a switch. And then to other devices
like your computers, network-attached storage,
things like that. Whereas, the WAN port is designed to connect to a wide area network, or something connected to the internet. We'll get more into that when I talk about some of our current equipment. Another benefit of these is
these are designed to run 24/7. They put these devices
in, like, police cars, ambulances, first
responders, things like that. They use these, these are
tough, they're rugged. They're designed to be
used in a mobile situation, and be on all the time. It's also very easy to
connect external antennas. Most of these do come with
these little blade antennas that you can put on here, and quite honestly, these antennas have a really
good quality reception, even if you have them inside your RV, or you can be like us, and you can use an external
antenna on the roof, or on a pole, and then just plug them in right here. These also typically have
external antennas for your Wi-Fi, also, but we're gonna
get into more of that when we talk about our current setup. And the other the newest
kid in the game is Starlink. You can see it right over here. We have our Starlink setup. We've been testing out Starlink, and in our video two years ago where I talked about Starlink, and I said, ah, it's not even a thing
yet, it's a thing now. And you may have seen a
lot of videos on that. I'm gonna touch on it briefly, and talk about how we integrated it, but you can use Starlink on its own. It's not great, and I'll get into why, but it's a very simple device. You've got this router
that sits right here, and you've got an antenna
that goes on the roof, and you've got a line that runs from the
antenna to the Starlink, and then from the Starlink
to power, and that's it. This little device right here
has its own built in Wi-Fi, and you connect to it and it works great. It does have some limitations though, and I'm gonna talk more about those. So let's talk data plans. All this hardware might
seem a little confusing, and it can be, but once you
understand it, it's not so bad, but quite honestly, the
hardware part of it, once you decide on what you're gonna get, that's the easy part because
connecting things up, hardware is hardware. Data plans on the other hand are where the real pain comes in. The reason it's so painful is you gotta really read the fine print. There are a ton of options
out there that are unlimited. The trouble is everybody's
version of unlimited is a little bit different, and none of them are
really truly unlimited. The reason I say that is because most of your unlimited plans have some sort of data cap on them, meaning you can use a
bazillion gigabits of data, but after your first 20
gigabytes, as an example, we're gonna throttle you
to, like, 128 kilobits, or we're gonna throttle you to standard definition streaming, or one megabit per second, or something along those lines. Those data caps usually
come in two different types, either a hard throttle data cap, meaning as soon as you hit your limit, you are throttled no matter what. So as soon as you hit your 20 or 25 or 22, or whatever it is,
you're gonna be throttled to a very specific, very low speed. And now they also have
a sort of soft data cap, or a network management data cap. And that's what our AT&T plan is. And what that is is you
have a certain amount of guaranteed high speed
data such as 20 gigabytes, I think is what ours is. After that 20 gigabytes, you're subject to network management. And all that means is if
there are 20 of us here in this RV park, we're all using AT&T, and I've reached my data
cap of 20 gigs, or whatever, and somebody else has it. And we're both trying
to compete for bandwidth on this congested tower
I'm gonna get deprioritized because I've passed my cap. Now, in reality what we've seen on this over the past four or
five years on the road, is that I don't ever notice a throttle. It seems to always work, but
the nice thing about it is, and I think this is the
way they should all be, but that's just me. They're basically saying, hey,
if we've got the bandwidth, you can have it and you can use it. And if we don't, we're gonna throttle you. And to me, that's fair. And that's more of an
unlimited than anything. And if then, of course, the next step up is a truly
unlimited un-throttled, and those are like unicorns,
those are very rare, but they can be found and
we're gonna get into those. So how much data do you need, and do you really need unlimited internet? Well, it really depends on how you're gonna use the internet. Now, if all you're gonna do is
check email, browse the web, look at websites, not
do a lot of streaming, you might be completely fine
with one of those hard capped 20 gigabit plans, or
something along those lines, but if you're like us and
you do a lot of streaming, we watch YouTube like everybody else, you're watching YouTube right now. We also have apple TVs and
we stream all of our content, all of our normal TV,
we've got HBO, Discovery. Every broadcaster out there
now has a streaming platform, some better than others, but you can stream just
about everything now. And we've been doing streaming only. No cable provider for over four years now, and it's been great, but that streaming
really goes through data. A standard definition stream, which, of course, is one
of the lowest qualities is gonna use about three
megabits per second. And you're gonna go through
about a gigabyte an hour. HD, or 10 ADP programming, which to me is kind of
like the new low minimum, but it's what we watch
most of the time now. You're gonna use about
five megabits per second. So that kind of tells you
what kind of speed you need. And you're gonna go through about three gigabytes in an hour. UHD streaming, or 4K streaming
we've not done a lot of. We're gonna be playing
a little more with that, but that requires a lot of bandwidth. You're gonna need about
25 megabits per second, which is pretty fast. And you're gonna go through a ton of data about seven gigabytes an
hour is what I read online, but the way these things work is when you're streaming content, if you're watching something like the news where most of the frame is staying still, and you've just got talking heads, that's not using a lot of data. If you're watching the latest "Top Gun" where there's lots of
movement and things going on, that requires more data, more stuff is going on on the screen. So more stuff is coming
across the internet to get to your TV, but the takeaway here is
that you need a lot of data if you're going to stream your content. And quite honestly, most of the plans from
the carriers themselves, from your Verizon, from your AT&T, even though they're unlimited, most of them are hard cap throttles. And after you've watched just a few shows you could watch maybe
three, four, five movies, boom, you're at your cap. And now you're being throttled
to standard definition, or worse. So most of your plans
directly from the carriers, just simply aren't gonna cut it. Luckily, there are some options out there. The problem is they're
changing constantly. And this again is where the
Mobile Internet Resource Center comes in because we get asked
all the time about this. What's the best plan? And honestly, I don't know. I know the plans that we have most of them you can't get anymore. Our AT&T plan you just
can't get it anymore. It's been gone for five years, and, sorry, there's not
much you can do about it. The good news is there are
some data plans out there that either have very, very
high cap like 800 gigabyte, or 1,000 gigabytes, or
they're truly unlimited. Now these are gonna cost
more than your standard plans from the actual carriers
where those are usually like 20, 30, 40, 50 bucks a month. Most of these are in the
120 to $160 range a month, but when you need the
data, you need the data. And back to the Mobile
Internet Resource Center, they are the best resource to figure out what are the current best data plans. They have a page that they
update I believe monthly, or when something new comes out. I'll link to that down below. If there's breaking news, like, hey, this great
plan that's been available for a couple years is going away. That's when you really, really want to be a member of the MIA, or the
Mobile Internet Aficionados so that you can be notified immediately. We have a mix of plans right now. One of them is AT&T that I mentioned. We've got a grandfather plan. That's, like, 20 bucks a month. That's, like, gold. We also have a plan
through Mobile Must Have. All the gear we're gonna talk about, our partner, Mobile Must
Have, sells all that stuff. And they can actually help
you kind of get in line with what you need for your situation, but they have all that stuff. And when you buy your gear through them, you also have access to their data plans. So you can purchase those. Another resource we have
is called EZ Mobile Data. That's who our Verizon plan is with. It's hit and miss, you know. It's tough to find one
company that has everything. So you gotta kind of look
and see what's out there, and pick what's best for you. Enough about data plans. Let's jump into our gear and
what we're running right now. Now I'll preface this and
say that this crazy setup that we have is mainly so that we can test different options, and try things out, try new
products, try new technology. So this isn't gonna be for everybody, except for maybe some of the core pieces. If you're enjoying this content, please give us some love
by clicking that thumbs up. Please subscribe if you haven't already. Those are indicators to YouTube
that our content is good, and should be recommended to others. So we really appreciate it. The first piece we're gonna
talk about replaced this guy. This is the MAX Transit Duo. The new device we have is
called the MAX Transit Pro. And it's almost identical to
this, it's the exact same box. If you looked at the two side by side, you probably couldn't tell the difference unless you looked on the back here, but the biggest difference is
they both have dual modems. This one has dual CAT-12 modems. It's just a category of modem. They're both LTE, meaning they're 4G. The difference is our newer
one has an upgraded modem. It's been upgraded from CAT-12 to CAT-7. Now that might not seem like an upgrade going from 12 to seven, but the biggest difference
there is category seven modems support band 71, which is a T-Mobile band
that has become very popular because it has, I think, 600 megahertz, and it reaches a long way, meaning it's very good for rural areas, and it works really, really
well far from the tower. It also has Wi-Fi 6 technology, which I assume is better than Wi-Fi 5. I don't really know a whole lot about it. We're wired most of the time, but one of the biggest
reasons we upgraded to it is because it has a faster processor. Now that might not mean a lot to some, but when we start talking
about some of the SpeedFusion, and bonding technologies, our processor on our MAX
Transit Duo was getting pegged, and it wasn't able to handle, or give us the throughput
that was available. So that's our current main hub. That guy acts as our Wi-Fi our
main hub that we connect to. Additionally, to help us
extend our internal Wi-Fi here, we have two, I think, they're
called mini access points, AP Ones, that basically allows us to have a physical access point
here in the office, and also up in our bedroom. Because we have an external
antenna which I'm gonna get to, our Wi-Fi that is directly connected here is actually on our roof. So the Wi-Fi inside the RV
wasn't as good as it could be. So we have those access
points to handle that. It also allows us to use
our Wi-Fi in the truck. Because we have an access
point in the bedroom that's close to where the
truck and the hitch is, we can actually use that Wi-Fi while we're driving down the road. Now in this device, we've got four SIM slots here. Currently, we're using one in each because it has two modems. We've got AT&T in one, and that's our grandfathered
AT&T true unlimited plan. And we've also got our Verizon
plan from EZ Mobile Data that is also truly unlimited. I mentioned we have this
connected to an antenna. Our antenna didn't change
from our last video. So if you want to see
how we installed that, you can go check that out, but we've got an antenna
mounted on our roof. It's just a small little dome antenna. It's the Poynting 7-in-1 Antenna. Seven just means it's got four
MIMO cellular connections. It's got two Wi-Fi and one GPS. Now, the reason it has the four
MIMO is it's two per modem. So you can see that I've got cellular one, I've got two connections here, and cellular two I've got two connections. So we've got true MIMO
on the roof all the time. In addition to that antenna that's permanently mounted on our roof, we have another antenna
that's pole mounted, and it's the Akita Parsec 4x4 MIMO. So it, like our
permanently mounted antenna also has four cellular connections. The big difference here is we can put that on our weBoost 25 foot pole
and get it way up in the air. And, again, getting your
antenna as high as possible, gets it away from all
the interference in here. It gets it a better line of
sight to the cellular tower. I read somewhere that every five feet gives you an extra 10 dB, or something. I forget what it is, but the higher the better
when it comes to antennas. We only use that when we need to. When we get to a new location,
I do some speed checks. I see what I'm getting on
Verizon, and AT&T, and T-Mobile, and if they're good I leave it alone. I just use the roof antenna, but if we're in say the mountains, or somewhere where we're far
away from the cellular antenna, I will hook up our pole
on the side, crank it up, put up our 4x4 MIMO. We have a junction box on our
roof with waterproof glands that we can connect our wires through. And it goes right down
into our tech cabinet here. So all I do is I unscrew our
mounted antenna connections, and I attach the ones
from the Parsec antenna. It's just that simple, and now we're using an antenna
that's way up in the air versus right on our roof. And, honestly, that is the reason we don't use boosters anymore. If I wanna get an antenna
way up in the air, I'm not gonna use a booster antenna that only has one channel. I'm gonna use our Parsec
antenna that has four channels. Also, new in our tech cabinet up here is the Pepwave MAX BR1 Pro 5G. It took me, like, five
times to get that out. The big thing there is
it's a CAT-20 modem, which it means it can do 5G. It has the fifth
generation technology there to actually use those newer
bands like n71, or T-Mobile, but also AT&T and Verizon. Wherever 5G is available
that guy can connect to it. That is currently holding
our T-Mobile plan. That T-Mobile plan is
from Mobile Must Have, and that one is good for
800 gigabytes a month, which is usually plenty when we mix it with all of our other ones. By the way, that Pro 5G, because it's 5G, it has actually four antenna
connections unlike this, which has two per modem. That 4x4 Parsec MIMO antenna
works really well for that. However, I've been having really good luck with just the blade antennas. So that's the way it's
connected right now, but, again, diversity of
plans, diversity of equipment, diversity of antennas, all just means I have a lot more options when I get into those weird situations. So you might be wondering how we have both of these new
devices sitting up there. It's really simple. I have the MAX BR1 connected
to the WAN port of this, and then I have the Wi-Fi
just disabled on it. So it's basically a dedicated modem, and it allows this guy
to talk to it directly, as well as use its two internal modems. Our new MAX Transit Pro is essentially directly connected to. Of course, it's in two internal modems, but also the external Pro 5G
that's connected to T-Mobile. And, of course, now we also have Starlink. So you might say, how the heck do we get
Starlink in this mix? Well, Starlink has its own built-in Wi-Fi. So all we do is we use the
Wi-Fi as WAN feature of this guy to connect to it. So most of these Pepwave routers, they have their built-in modems. Of course, they could
talk directly to towers, but they also have Wi-Fi as WAN, which means you can use another
Wi-Fi as a WAN connection. So you can use that to say
connect to campground Wi-Fi, if you want, or to a Starlink, if you wanna do that. Of course, Starlink does
have an ethernet option, so it could be plugged
directly into the WAN port, but our WAN port is
being used by our Pro 5G. So that's off limits
because it's being used. So we connect to that over Wi-Fi. In fact, right now where we're sitting, we're actually connected
to AT&T and Verizon. The Verizon connection isn't very good, but we're also connected to the Starlink. So you might be asking, okay, Starlink, can I just
use Starlink by itself? And the answer is yes and no. If you look at the
coverage map for Starlink, you'll see that the West Coast is really, really well covered, and the East Coast not so
much, it's not quite as good. And all the testing we've done so far has been on the East Coast. So I can't really speak to
how well it works out West, but here it's been hit and miss. Number one, you've gotta
have a really wide open sky for this thing to talk to as
many satellites as it can. If you're not familiar, Starlink is a Low-Earth Orbit solution. So it's a little bit
different than traditional, or older, I won't say traditional, 'cause it's not traditional anymore, but older satellite technologies. Also, the kind that you're
gonna see with DISH and DIRECTV, the old Viasat. Those all use geosynchronous satellites. And you'd usually be talking to one, or a cluster of satellites
that are in a single spot over the equator, because that has to be that
way for orbital dynamics, but they point to one place in
the sky and they stay there. Starlink is completely different. It's got this phased array antenna. There are satellites just
whipping across the sky, crisscrossing all over the place. There's a really cool map
online you can actually see 'em, but the idea there is
rather than connect to one, it's gonna connect to
one for a little bit, and then pick up another one,
and then pick up another one. The trouble is if one of those satellites that you're talking to goes behind a tree, or goes out of view, or there's a gap in coverage where there's not currently a
satellite right over your head then your internet is out. Now the ramifications of
this kind of coverage, where it may just go out at any second will affect you differently
depending on what you're doing. If you are just streaming TV, most of your streaming services
are designed with a buffer, meaning what you're watching, it's already downloaded
the next few minutes of it. So if your connection goes out, it can start playing that buffer until the connection comes back. And, hopefully, it comes back in time before you reach the end of your buffer, but if you're doing
things like Zoom calls, or you've got a VPN
into your work situation where you're using a remote desktop, or something along those lines, it's out you're done, you're disconnected. If you're just gonna stream, you might be okay with Starlink. It might be a bit annoying
if you've got an outage for a minute or two, but it's
not the end of the world. If you're working remotely,
however, in my opinion, Starlink is not quite
ready for prime time. Maybe in a year or two, as they get their full
satellite coverage up there. Right now I don't know where they are as far as their percentage of
how many satellites they want versus how many they plan to have, but the coverage just
isn't there right now for full-time work remotely in my opinion, but like I mentioned if
you're working remotely, specifically, if you have a
job that you need to VPN into, or something, you really need to have a diverse array of connection options, and a diverse array of data plans. You might not go as crazy as we do with three cellular data plans
and Starlink and all that, but the more you have
the better chance it is that you're gonna be able to
connect everywhere you go. If you're interested in a deeper dive into Starlink by itself, leave a comment down below. It's not something that I planned on doing because we don't use it dedicated, but I'm happy to give my opinions, and go a little bit deeper
into that if you're interested, leave a comment down below. So just a quick recap on all that. And I'll start with this
guy and it's not this one, but it looks like this. We've got our new MAX Transit Pro. It has built-in two modems. One is CAT-7, one is CAT-12. One is connected to AT&T right now. And the other one is connected to Verizon. On our WAN port we're connected
directly to our Pro 5G, which is using T-Mobile 5G, and also connected over
Wi-Fi is our Starlink. So this guy is currently connected to four different
connections simultaneously, which brings us to our next topic, which is how do you use those? What's the benefit? Why would you even do that? And that's where we're gonna
get into some of our failover, and bonding and things like that. I'm not gonna go real, real deep here because it's pretty advanced, but you should be able
to have a general idea of what the differences
are when we're done. And the first advantage is failover. So these can be set up
so that if you're talking say on your AT&T plan, and all of a sudden AT&T goes to crap, it can automatically
failover to something else. That can either be another
SIM card on the same modem, which is the slowest form of failover, because it has to reset the modem, and essentially reboot itself
with the new SIM card active. The other form of
failover is let's just say you have two active
connections at the same time, which is even better. So say you've got AT&T and Verizon, or say you have AT&T and campground Wi-Fi, or AT&T and Starlink, any two connections active constantly. This thing can be set up so
that as soon as that one fails, it switches over automatically. Now both of those type
of failover connections are going to disrupt your connection. So if you're doing something
like a VPN, or a Skype call, or a Zoom call it is going to go off, but then come right back. Again, depending on
how fast it fails over, but the advantage there is you
could reconnect immediately, and get back on your call, or something along those lines. Another advantage of having
multiple connections. And it's not really a step
up, but it's load balancing. So if you've got more than
one connection active, again, any two connections will do, be it cellular, Wi-Fi as WAN, or whatever, it can actually do what's
called load balancing. So as you're using
connections in the house, and say an Apple TV in
the bedroom fires up, and starts watching something
it can go out one connection, and you're browsing the web, it can go out another connection. It basically just kind of round-robins between the two of those, or three or four, or
however many you have. It's not super smart. It just tries to pick the connection with the least congestion, or the next one in line. Again, the way that works is because most of your connections for
things like VPNs and calls are going to be going
out that one connection, and staying connected if it has a hiccup, it's gonna disconnect. So the next best thing
up from that is bonding. What the heck is it? I'm gonna try to explain it. It's a little bit complex, and I'll probably use a drawing here, but think of it this way. You've probably heard of virtual
private networks or VPNs. People are using those a lot for security. And what that is is you have
a connection from your router, or from your computer to a
third party on the internet, and all your traffic between
you and them is encrypted. And the idea there is that nobody can tell where your connection is coming from, or what's going on, your ISP can't spy on you, or whatever. That's the standard use for a VPN. Another use is a tunnel, a VPN Tunnel, and it can actually use
multiple connections at once. And that's what bonding is. So bonding is essentially, it's a VPN that uses more
than one connection at a time, and manages all those connections. So the trick is you gotta have
something on the other end, something to VPN to that can
understand that connection, and Peplink has done a really,
really good job on this with their product called SpeedFusion. I think it used to be
called SpeedFusion Cloud. Now it's called SpeedFusion Connect, but the idea here is I've got this guy that can talk to SpeedFusion. And, again, this is not a technology that is specific to Peplink. There are lots of different
bonding technologies. You can build your own. The thing I like about this
is it's super, super simple. It's like three clicks and you're done. And what it does is it'll take whatever active connections you have, however many connections it
can see and manage directly. For us, I mentioned just a minute ago, we've got AT&T, and Verizon, and T-Mobile, and Starlink all together,
so we got four connections. It can take all four of those, and bind them together into
a single virtual channel. Now don't worry about how it does this. Just know that inside
it's almost like having four lines to the
internet at the same time, and they're all bonded into
one virtual connection. And the cool thing there is, it will actually send some of your data down multiple connections
at the same time. Again, depending on how you set it up. I'm not gonna go real deep into
that, unless you want me to, we can maybe do a separate video on that, but the idea here is I've
got those four connections, and they're all being
used at the same time. And this thing is managing, sending that data down one
or more of them all at once. And if AT&T dies, my
connection is not over AT&T, so say I've got a VPN
going, or a video call, or something along those lines, my connection is through the tunnel. And the fact that AT&T just died, doesn't matter to that tunnel. I mean, it does, it has to drop it, and manage that connection,
but your data keeps going, and this is the best solution for those who need to work
from home uninterrupted, who need to be on video calls, and not have it dropping
out every few minutes. The bonding, the SpeedFusion
thing is really, really cool. We've been using it now for two years, yes, since the last video. We use it pretty much all the time, and, again, you wanna be a
little bit smart about it because the connection's not free. You do have to pay Peplink
for the amount of data that you pump through there. So you'll wanna turn it on, and turn it off for certain applications. You don't wanna do all your
video streaming over this because video streaming
is pretty resilient, and kind of heals itself like I mentioned, with Starlink dropping
out it has a buffer. It'll try to keep up. So you don't want to
use that data for that. And the neat thing too, is the SpeedFusion Cloud
lets you actually set rules, and you can say, hey, for
Zoom calls use the tunnel, for everything else don't. So it really lets you customize it, and decide how you want
to use that connection. Another good use case for
this is our live streams. If you've watched our live streams, you might see that they
might go in and out as far as the video
quality it might change, but they never disconnect. That's because whenever
we do our live streams, we're always doing it over
a SpeedFusion connection. It's always bonded with
as many connections as we can get in there. The type of connection does matter. You don't want to have three
super fast connections, and one really, really slow connection 'cause that can bog the whole thing down. So we do usually do some testing, and figure out what
combination is gonna work best, but having bonded connections, having the SpeedFusion has allowed us to have our live streams go flawlessly. So that's our very complex setup. I know it's a little bit crazy having all these things
all connected together, but that's just how my roll. I love dealing with this tech, but I realize that's not for everybody. If you've got to work from home, and you need to VPN into work
and you need to do Zoom calls, one of these guys by
itself with a roof antenna, and a couple of data
plans is the way to go. That alone will allow you to use things like
SpeedFusion for your calls, and not drop calls, and
things along those lines. It's a really good way to go. So what's next for us? Because you know me, I already have my eye on
some new tech coming out. Pepwave has a new MBX
router that's coming out. That's going to be dual
modem much like this is, but both of the modems
are gonna be 5G capable. It also has a lot more WAN and LAN ports. So what that's going to allow me to do is connect to multiple 5G connections while also being hardwired to Starlink, and whatever else I want to connect to. So that's gonna be really cool, and that'll probably be another year before we have that out. That's not even out yet. I think the device comes
out in, like, five months, or something. I know some of this was super complicated, and if it went way, way over your head, go join the Mobile
Internet Resource Center, watch their course, then
come back and watch this. I guarantee you'll
understand a lot more of it. If you have any questions,
put them down below. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)
