WIFI in the caravan. Again

I really welcome back now the subject of Wi-Fi in the Koran all the most home is a topic that I could probably come back to year after year as demands and technology change the conversation needs to be kept updated in fact one of our very first videos was a review of this thing the who - trip mate and I get asked quite a lot these days whether I still use it and up until very recently we did it was fantastic for us it was able to connect onto a Wi-Fi hotspot it was able to share its connection between our devices here in the caravan it was also a media streamer or so Chloe could watch her videos Tom could watch his films and we could do whatever we wanted as well so it kept everybody happy and kept them enclosed in their own little bubble but time moves on and technology moves on one of the biggest downsides of this thing in fact was that it couldn't connect to the outside world it relied upon a Wi-Fi hotspot and anybody that looked at my video on how we got online in the caravan well know that we used this in conjunction with this to get online if there was no Wi-Fi available on site and in fact we use this quite a lot because the site Wi-Fi was always pretty poor it was never fast it was only really good enough to just get online get some emails and and that would be about it so technology has moved on quite a bit and for the summer we've been using a net gear m1 this is it net gear might talk m1 and eagle-eyed viewers will notice that over here I've got a box for a net gear m2 in fat let me show it to you here and I've been sent this one for review but this is not a review of this m2 I'm going to come back to this a bit more at the end of the video instead I'm going to answer some questions that we get asked quite a lot with regards to getting online so first of all let's answer one of the biggest questions why don't I just use my phone and tether the data smartphones these days are incredibly clever if you really want to you can let these things really rule your life sharing data is one such thing which they are very good at doing you simply have a good data connection you have yourself a good contract with lots of available data on it and you can share this out to other members of your family it's a great way of doing it there are a couple of limitations above all and one thing to really consider is this is not a my fight it is not a dedicated data sharing device above all a smartphone will be wanting to maintain its own data connections will be constantly wanting to keep its own services maintained so things like email and if you're using a cloud-based library file it will be wanting to maintain that as well it will maintain all of those things above and beyond the service of tethering data so what does that really mean well in fact it just means that you're going to get a slower connection so if you want data connection you're gonna get less bang for your buck going through a smart phone another thing to consider is there will be no security so there will be no parental controls there will be no firewall this thing will just share its connection with the outside world and it won't care now if you're okay with there being a limited speed and if you're okay with there being no security and if you're okay with it having to be plugged in all the time then carry on and use your phone but for us it really didn't work especially when I put my phone in my pocket and took the dog for a walk the rest of the family couldn't get on line and I got back to World War 3 back in the caravan but if you're ok with all of that and your circumstances are different to ours then carry on unusual phone if however you're not and you want a dedicated device to get on line with that you need to look at my phone and we were using a hawaii-based Wi-Fi right up until the beginning of some of this year and we made the switch to the neck a night talk m1 let me introduce that to you right now we've been using this one now since the beginning of the summer we've been having a really good time with it in fact it's being far far better than this thing which is a Hawaii equivalent it's also considerably more expensive this one retails for 289 I'm going to come back to the price at the end of the video let me go through some of the things which I really like about this device and off ultimately sold it to us at the beginning of the summer well first of all it's got a fantastically huge battery I mean you can see it's no small device it's got a huge battery whilst I was running it in the beginning of the summer I think I ran it for about four days without charge and it still maintained our connections purely running off this battery it goes for days and days and days without a charge it's reminiscent of a Nokia 3310 so those are above the age of 30 we all know what I'm talking about another thing I particularly like about this thing is the provision of an SD card in the back I've just taken the bottom off to show you you can see there that there was a small SD card in the back it's not unique to this Netgear I know that other my files do this as well that they you can put an SD card into them but for me this was the first time I actually did it it meant that when we were away in Burford early this year I was able to back up my camera straight to this device via Wi-Fi and it was really very useful because I forgot for some reason my other SD cards and I was able to back up at the end of every day copy over all my footage onto this device very useful very handy it wasn't a quick transfer I won't lie it was pretty slow I don't have that's down to this or whether it's down to the camera I know that I never really get on with the Wi-Fi function on the camera but it did back it up at the end of every day and I was able to keep all my footage here my final point is that you can add a USB Drive into this you just plug it in and you can stream media and I've talked about more about that in a moment well that was one of the big selling points for us at the very beginning is the fact that we can basically replicate everything that the hutu did for us but get online and not have to rely on a third party connection so some of the big selling points for us it has a huge battery it can stream its media it also has some fantastic security onboard as well so has parental controls it has VPN provisions and it also has a firewall built into it as well and for us the big standpoint is that it's the one box you need to get online unlike the hutu which doesn't get online relies on another hotspot this thing is very good for that this is even better this will also collect two hotspots as well it uses a system called data offloading which is a ridiculous name for something which is basically Wi-Fi bridging we haven't used it with that facility yet but we know it will work we're very very happy with it but there are a few things which were not so chuffed about so I mentioned that you can stream media and you can and it does it very well you can only do it via the nighthawk app or you can go onto a web browser and just point to this device and pull up its local front home page in either scenario you need to log in there's only one login and that's the admin login so if you want to go and watch tttt bang bang which you've downloaded onto this device you're going to give your daughter or your son the admin password to the nighthawk which potentially means you could be given them administrative rights to go and change any of the settings for this little device I haven't found the provision yet and I haven't found a route that allows you to put in a guest password either scenario I don't think that's a particularly great idea I think that's something that Nikia really should think about and incorporate in a future release now another thing which I've noticed is a bit of a bother is the fact that if you go away for the day let's say for example you're all connected to this and you go away for the day and you come back you don't automatically reconnect to the MiFi you have to press the button on the top which is the power button wake it up and then you can then find the Wi-Fi hotspot and you can then rejoin now that drove us nuts in the summer because we had to keep coming back in finding the my 5 press in the butt and reconnecting to the Wi-Fi and that was it job done it was essentially a problem for us because we actually put this away in a cupboard because we didn't want to look at it all day long so we had to dig it up the back the cupboard and switch it back on again for us to reconnect there is however an update to this I found the setting in all the settings which switches this off you can basically disable the Wi-Fi sleep mode and you basically have Wi-Fi all the time it will constantly polling it turns the Wi-Fi off if it decides that there's no one connected to it thus saving its battery life so out of default you will need to switch that off in order for it to be awake all the time and the problem with that is you'll be limiting a battery life but I'll be honest with you it's not such a huge battery anyway it's not gonna be much of an issue for us so the elephant in the room the cost this is where people get very animated this thing retails for two hun 89 pounds it's about 100 quid cheaper than the m2 I've discovered it's also about a hundred and thirty quid more expensive than this hawawa device so why should I spend more money on this than this so back in the office I set up an experiment I used to have pay-as-you-go sim and I used that with same sim across both devices first of all I put it into this one and I connected my desktop computer to the Wi-Fi hotspot that this generated I chose the same server and I did a speed test results on screen right now I did exactly the same thing I moved the sim card over to this one booted it up and it was in exactly the same position on the desk and nothing had changed I chose the same server I chose the same everything I tried to make it as baseline as I possibly could and I did the speed test and this one so you can see although small there is quite a considerable speed difference I have since been out and about and I've done some other tests between the two comparing them like for like numeracy which one's faster which one's better which one's more reliable and I can tell you that this one is okay it's good and it does a great job but this one is just another league if we were to compare them to cars I think we could say this was a Fiat won 2-6 nice car but this is a Ferrari f50 nice color they both have wheels they both have steering wheels they both have tires one just does it a little bit better than the other one now the final thing I'm going to say about the cost of these things is yes that's 289 pounds is quite a lot of money I'm not going to deny that but then you see the phone which people were saying will just show you data with all this cost a thousand pounds now I'm not stupid enough to go and spend a thousand pounds on a phone no I just get this on a contract like any other normal person and that's exactly what you can do with one of these in fact I'd look around today and I found you can get this very device on o2 I'll put a link to that deal down below but talking about data and talking about connections which is best pairs you go or contract and what if I decided to go with with this device in the end we went for a Sky mobile deal which was a 10 gig data a month it has free text and it has free calls not that we're really interested in that but is there if we want it 10 gigs a month well that doesn't sound like an awful lot does it certainly feels sharing your device between a number of people and that's true the thing that really sold it to us for Sky Mobile is their provision for rolling data over to the next month so this month I haven't used the data on this device I've got 10 gigs now which is stuck into the piggy bank Chloe our daughter she has a Sky Mobile account as well she has 8 gigs of data a month and she rarely uses it because she's always on a Wi-Fi hotspot so her 8 gigs usually gets rolled over as well we've also got another SIM card here in the Fayette in the caravan for useful the trimmer' system that's in a future video that has about 2 gigs a month and that never gets used so I always rolls over so if we do nothing we can usually roll over about 20 gigs a month on top of the 10 gigs that we have on this device so in the piggy bank at any given point I have about 30 gigs of data ready to use so you may be saying to yourself well why don't you just buy yourself an unlimited package and buy yourself an unlimited amount of data going forward we see I have a fundamental problem for paying for something that I'm never going to use if I'm going to use it fine I mean we have a look at some great deals we're about 30 pounds a month for unlimited data but we're never going to use unlimited data we're never going to use 30 40 50 hundred gigs worth in a month to make that really worthwhile for us we're just never going to use it and for us personally the best route is to use a small amounts of data the piggy bank over a longer period because we're never going to be away in the caravan all the time using the data every single weekend and for us that's the perfect setup we pay very little in fact it cost us just 10 pounds month for the 10 gigs 10 pounds a month and we know that we've got as much data as we will need when we go away I'm sure there will be a time when we need to buy more but I'm ok with that because that's not going to happen every single month so as I mentioned I've got this the net Hawk m2 which is the bigger younger brother to this the m1 now we'll notice that there's a few other channels which are popping up which we were doing with some reviews of the m2 already and that's great we've obviously sent this one for review as well as you can see I still haven't opened it and I want to ask you the question what would you like to see as a review of this one would you like a more technical in-depth review would you like in comparison between the n1 and the m2 why is this 100 pounds more is this one the one you want to go for let's compare the two and see what the differences are let me know in the comments below I will unbox this one at some point maybe that's part of the video an unboxing let me know your thoughts of what you'd like to see from this one so that's it from me today I hope this one's been useful for you I'm sure we'll come back and visit this topic again next year when everything changes once again and no doubt you'll want an update as to how we get online if you're not interested in getting online of course well this video really wouldn't have been for you and thank you for sitting through and watching it all the way through but for other people who do want to get online either to check out the weather book tickets or check out other local attractions what's to do away you know that is a great piece of kit to think about it's something that we've used a noun we keep in the caravan all the time with never leaves the caravan we have it plugged in in fact I've done a little bit of an installation up by the radio so there's a constant charging point for it and it never leaves at the caravan it's been really really good so anyway that's it from me today please subscribe to the channel hit the notification icon and if you can do all of that and hopefully we'll see you next week many thanks for watching guys who like to go travel in our caravan and tell our stories as we go about here there and everywhere well our channel you can see a site site reviews or site tools are tips away in the caravan as well and also you might even find some product reviews as well so come on over check out our channel on YouTube follow us on Twitter Instagram and Facebook thanks for watching bye for now bye bye Bobby

Channel: The Trudgians

Views: 87,319

Keywords: caravan, wifi, netgear, HooToo, Nighthawk M1, MiFi, dongle, Media streaming, Sky Mobile, Huawei, The Trudgians, how to, help, explanation, NightHawk M1, Network, Security, VPN, Internet access, 4g router, share media, WIFI in the caravan. Again, Netgear Nighthawk MR1100

Id: G9o0Lds0Gg4

Length: 16min 4sec (964 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 31 2019