UNLIMITED and CHEAP Mobile Internet Setup for Remote Work While RVing

hey guys brian here from five to go and today we're talking about internet so we haven't really done a proper internet video ever on our channel um i had a video a couple months ago where i talked about how we handle streaming and gaming and all that sorts of stuff but we still get a lot of questions about how we actually get internet from out there into the rig here the primary reason that we haven't done that is because until a couple months ago our internet option was not something that you could go out and buy but before we get to that here's a few time codes of the different topics of what i'm going to cover in today's video i'm hoping it'll be a pretty quick one because we don't have a very elaborate setup uh but if you want to go ahead and just jump ahead to one of those that's cool if you want to watch all the way through even better so let's get to it so first up we've been on the road pretty much for three and a half years now we did have a year in colorado where we rented a house uh but we still had our internet plan uh while we were there but prior to that we were on the road for 20 months and then we've been on the road again since last june so we've needed reliable internet for quite a long time now we have an at t plan that we purchased four years ago that had unlimited unthrottled hotspot like actual legit here's a hot spot we'll send it to you from at t there's a sim in here just for this and it has its own line and it is completely unlimited completely on throttled it's not downgraded traffic it's not anything like it's one of those old hotspot plans that i'm i'm probably going to take this one to my grave or uh you know once starlink is a thing this can go bye-bye the signal that we get from this little router here uh is pretty good the cell signal that we connect to when we are in areas where there are towers far away or um kind of more remote areas uh it can struggle just a little bit because it only has internal antennas this is the entire thing other than a usbc plug on the bottom for power but it does have what are called ts9 connectors which is little pairs these little guys here of external antenna connectors now when it comes to external antennas for this i went for a very very long time without using them and really had no issues um but then we uh on the discord server fivetogo.com discord uh we were talking i guess probably six or seven months ago about external antennas and i was like let's go try one around the time that we were discussing that a company called high boost reached out to us we're like hey do you wanna test out a cell booster and i was like sure um i don't like cell boosters uh it it's here it's this one that's the one i tested out and um in every possible configuration uh the sell signal may be increased by one barish but my data speeds went down so i'm pretty convinced that cell boosters are just snake oil so stay away from cell boosters and get yourself an external antenna so the simple solution is if your hotspot has the little ts9 connectors on the bottom like that this guy right here it's uh it's just a little suction cup window mount antenna 40 bucks on amazon links below of course and uh that increased the signal on that little router remarkably well like it's it's surprising how much better my signal is with that and the main reason is is because i can put this little guy here you see how it has a command velcro strip on the back i can put that up near one two three four five windows where i have access to power and i have somewhere to put a command strip so it just this guy just suction cups onto the window and i can basically point this any direction i need to because between those five windows i can point any way i want to towards wherever the nearest tower is and this little guy will connect to that tower way better than just the hot spot because it gets the connection away from the wall where there might be you know metal or wires or stuff and just right into the glass where there's nothing in between it and the tower so that is by far your best bang for your buck when it comes to external antennas if you have the ts9 connectors if you don't um it's going to be a little more challenging so again fivetogo.com discord we have a entire chat room in that channel dedicated to rv internet lots of information in there uh we actually gained probably about 300 new people just from the video i did a couple weeks ago uh where i was showing off my friends 2800 bh and we just kind of offhandedly said hey if you want to know more about internet stuff go here a lot of you guys did which is awesome so if you want to know more about any of this go there next up in the the evolution of our uh internet life this is a netgear nighthawk mr 1100 this is a very standard uh you'll see this all over the place these have limits when it comes to the number of wi-fi connections that they will serve in your house or in your rv or whatever so this one claims it will serve up reliably 15 wi-fi connections um when it got to 9 it started to slow down and when it got to 10 it would just randomly drop people from the network so i was having issues with that because we have one two three four five we have five or six laptops three fire sticks an echo dot two wireless cameras uh four phones because we each have a phone and i have a work phone we have all sorts of stuff the kids have tablets like we have way more than nine wi-fi devices in order to manage all of the wi-fi from that and kind of offload some of that processing power from the router and just let it do its thing to connect to the internet i got one of these guys this is i can't remember the model number right off the top of my head because i it is model number is covered by uh a command velcro strip you'll see this is a common theme here command velcro strips um but this little guy the model number is right here uh this can basically be set up in a variety of ways and i use it as a bridge so this guy takes the wi-fi from this guy and creates a new wireless network that i then connect all of the random stuff to so the tablets the cameras the echo dot uh the kids equipment like the tablets and tara's laptop and all that i put all of that stuff on here and this is only using one wi-fi slot on this guy so that increased the performance of my nighthawk pretty significantly which was very nice and this will come into play again in just a minute as we continue through the evolution of our networking uh but this is an awesome little guy has an antenna you can do the antenna however you want you can get it without an antenna um i have this with the command velcro strip i have this in the bathroom that might sound kind of silly but the bathroom is in the middle of the rv so no matter where this guy is whether he's up front here with me or back in the bedroom on one of those other windows this guy's always within range and always in the middle ready to serve that uh network out to wherever you are in the rv and even outside of it so what evolved after this between the att service that we have that router and uh this little extra dude here and this little um extra antenna there 100 we are operating at 100 percent um have we had issues with att signal strength sure is it ever completely non-existent no except for one case we did there is one thousand trails that is in the mountains above santa barbara california where nobody has cell service there was nothing even close to anything you could have connected to i don't even think a booster wouldn't have been able to find anything because we were up in the mountains in a valley no towers anywhere it was ridiculous other than that one campground we've been totally fine with just the single hotspot because it is completely unlimited and completely unthrottled but unfortunately that's not available so what could you get that should perform similarly so about a month and a half ago i got an email from a company called travel data and they claim to offer a completely unlimited completely unthrottled internet service uh through the t-mobile network because they wanted to just send it to us to test it out i was like sure why not so it looks like this this is the one that i picked out they have two different ones on their site uh there's this one with the um hilariously large antennas but this one needs to be plugged in all the time they have another one that's smaller uh that does have a battery inside but because this one just lives in the rig i went ahead and went with this model um so like i said before this is completely unlimited completely unthrottled on the t-mobile network i was very skeptical so as soon as i received this thing i just started downloading video games so i think in the first um in the first week or two i think i ran 200 gigs of data through that thing not a single hiccup not a single slowdown there was a slight issue with the firmware to be completely honest um this thing apparently was uh pegging out the cpu at 100 and not letting it slow down uh so it would overheat and turn itself off but the company was very responsive and they actually remoted into it rolled the firmware back one version and it has been completely flawless since then um so in that first month of testing i think i put about four or 500 gigs of data through here um just to test it like i just hopped on steam and just started downloading all sorts of stuff and um this little sucker is fast too um steam has really nice little speed charts and i saw it get up to i think two and a half or three megs per second which if you have used cellular data before you know that's pretty fast so what are some of the catches with travel data first of all you have to use their hardware you have to use either this one or the other smaller one i believe the smaller one does have external antennas too i'm not positive but you have to use one of these too because this is actually it's the same company that makes this it's called gl inet and uh it's so it's the same company that makes the hardware but they have some custom open wrt firmware uh software running on this that has whatever it is they need to do to connect to t-mobile and t-mobile is maybe not the best network especially when you compare it to att or verizon uh but all that do your own research figure out where you're going to be going look at the different provider maps and see if something like t-mobile will work for you for us uh now that we actually have this travel data thing in hand i like the fact that i have redundancy now so i have a t and i have t-mobile so if one of them works better than the other great if one of them doesn't work at all i have one to fall back on so that's actually kind of a nice segue into the uh the final form if you will of our network here in our home on wheels let's go back to this guy here this is my little bridge that i have the kids tablets the cameras the fire sticks the uh the echo dot like all the random stuff on so what i do now that i have two different networks that are both unlimited and both not throttled is um i have all of we'll say the kids stuff connected to this and then my laptop which is right here uh aaron's laptop and the fire stick that is on our primary tv the big one here in the living room i do not connect to this i connect that one manually to either my at t network or my t-mobile network uh that is faster so whichever one of those is faster and then the other one gets connected to this guy so the kids always have the slower network because i'm in charge so that's just kind of a nice little uh extra thing extra benefit that that little bridge gives me now so if you look at this you'll notice there are no ts9 connectors that this guy uses because those look like they look like little tiny they kind of just look like little electrical leads they're very very odd connectors they don't stay in super well so i need to make sure that the cable supported so they don't pull themselves out but you can't connect those to this but this does have these screw-on antennas i'm not positive what the form factor is for these antennas but if you've ever done any kind of uh networking with like wi-fi cards or anything like that it's these i think it's like sma or sba something like that um so you could if you wanted to take these antennas off and do an external antenna and you could also do that with the ts9 connectors because those external antennas you can just get adapters to go from whatever form factor your external antenna is to ts9 and off you go so speaking of external antennas that might be my next project but i i really i don't need it right now i know there are a lot of people that have very complex setups they have pep waves with multiple sims and they have all just all this hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars of equipment sitting up in a cabinet with antennas on top and all of that i just don't need that i work from the road full time i need a stable internet connection and i need it to be relatively fast because i do have to remote into desktops to do stuff i do remote i t desktop support for a large retail company um so i do need pretty good internet and with just this alone i have that i won't ever be one of the people that does all of that extra stuff i think as far as i might go is get a pull to mount to my ladder and put a couple uh directional maybe not direction i was thinking of the panel antennas up on one of those poles so if we have any areas that the connection is a little bit spotty i can get that pole up over the rig and aim it towards the nearest antenna and have a better signal and a more reliable signal and then whichever network is closest i'll just have the right connectors for the the line coming in to either do ts9 or uh whichever connector this guy is so i think that might be it i don't see myself going any more complex with that um and unfortunately i think a lot of people have been forced into that because stuff like this is not available anymore there are some services out there there's a lot of websites out there that have a lot more information about stuff like this but one thing that kind of scares me is there are resellers out there where you can get actually unlimited plans you basically just buy a sim and bring your own hardware but those can go away at any time uh we have friends that had one of those services through um i can't remember if it was mobile must-have or nomad internet or whatever whoever that service was it's right here but they had an att sim through there and a couple weeks ago about actually about a month and a half ago they got an email sunday evening saying hey you might lose your internet access um because whatever's going on behind the scenes was happening and then the next day they had no internet for about a week and a half until they sent them a new sim so that's kind of scary so i've talked to the guy that runs this place and he claims and don't hold me to it but he says that that won't happen with this service i have seen no issues with it i've seen no slowing down with it i've never heard of anyone having trouble with this uh so maybe if that's true then this is actually kind of amazing another thing that's really nice about it is it's uh 79 a month for a really good connection so 79 a month is really cheap when it comes to mobile internet if you've researched it at all go ahead and check out travel data stuff it's uh set up a little referral link so you can get a couple dollars off if you do place an order it's fivetogo.com travel data and if you want to join us on discord and talk about everything internet fibergo.com discord will get you to our server once you're in there go to the hashtag rvdash internet channel and uh there will be a bunch of pinned messages um about my setup about travel data and then a couple videos ago i talked to ben my friend ben who has done a whole bunch of geekery to his trailer he has one of those complex setups with pep waves and multiple sims and all of that stuff if you want to learn more about that there's a pinned message in that channel that has his entire setup listed out and he's also in there all the time asking questions because ben is awesome so there's a ton you can learn about all of this stuff my recommendation for you is don't get lost in all of it you don't have to go out and spend two thousand dollars on a bunch of hardware and drill a bunch of holes in your roof you can start with something like this and if it works for you it's 79 bucks a month and it just sits on your dashboard or sits on your counter and that's it i mean you don't need to add anything else to this you just plug it in connect to the wi-fi off you go it's awesome it's a great solution especially if you're a part-timer and you just need a connection you know a couple of weekends here and there that's a great solution if you want to do a bunch of holes and a bunch of extra hardware and a bunch of wiring and all of that go for it i love it i i'm a total nerd and i love that stuff i just i like simple solutions as well so that's why i'm sticking with what i've got and i just wanted to run through all of that for you guys real quick um so again any questions fivetogo.com discord leave a comment down below if you have any questions about any of this stuff and again uh things like this there are links down below uh to amazon for products like that and i've got links to travel data down there and all that stuff so just as a quick reminder we do have a big caravan going on this summer with our road runners and uh this is the shirt that i made for it it's awesome here i know you like it if you want one fivetogo.com roadrunners you'll get access to our entire route what site numbers we're in in which campgrounds through which dates so if you want to come camp with us you can do that i think we have seven or eight different families coming to camp with us at various different stops and we have two other families that are going to be with us for the entire route we are so so excited for this trip it's going to be awesome so if you want to become a road runner and follow along it'll be a ton of behind the scenes stuff and if you want to join us that's the way to do it find out where we're going to be and when so if i have to go to com slash road runners get yourself an awesome tour shirt like this and it even has like a tour thing on the back where it lists out all the locations but i can't show you guys that it's just for road runners alright guys see you in the next video

Channel: Five2Go

Views: 255,693

Keywords: travel data, travel data review, cheap rv internet, unlimited rv internet, rv internet unlimited, rv wifi solutions, mobile internet options for rvers, rv internet, rv internet solutions, full time rv internet options, rv mobile internet options, unlimited hotspot 2021, rv internet access on the road, best rv internet, mobile hotspot unlimited data, rv internet 2021, unlimited data, unlimited hotspot, internet for rv, rv wifi setup, rv wifi, Mobile internet

Id: PlVsFE_LAJY

Length: 20min 29sec (1229 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 25 2021