I’m looking for a factual answer here, not hypothetical solutions…
About 5 years ago my wife and I moved from the SF Bay Area to Northwest Montana. We love living here, but the winters are long and cold, and we would like to be able to take a few months traveling in a 5th wheel and visiting with our kids.
Since I already work from home my boss isn’t too concerned about where I actually am, but he is concerned about my having good Internet connectivity.
If we rented a house somewhere it would be relatively easy to get high speed Internet from a local provider, but if we decide to become ‘mobile snowbirds’ that makes things more complicated. I would need to be able to roll into a random campground, plug into power and be able to have at least 10 Mb download speed, presumably from a satellite connection.
I’m familiar with digital TV systems that are installed on RVs and some trailers, but I don’t know if they also come with an internet connection, or if there is a separate satellite-based system that we would use just for the Internet.
Does anyone have any experience using these kinds of systems and can you tell me what I should expect for cost and performance?
If I can’t find a reasonable solution I will just have to tough it out here in Montana until I am ready to retire from working in about 5 years.
There’s two major satellite internet providers, Hughes Net and Wild Blue. I’ve only had a little bit of experience with Hughes Net, but it’s pretty expensive, the speeds aren’t great and the bandwidth caps can be pretty restrictive is the lower cost plans. Still much better than nothing though! I also think installing and properly aligning the dish is somewhat more involved than with a normal TV dish, so it may not be particularly well suited for mobile use. I could be wrong on that though.
IMO, these days cellular internet is really the way to go in all but the most rural areas. 4G is faster than my cable internet at home and 3G is plenty usable. The trick is just finding a way to buy mobile data access for cheap. Most of the contract plans make data fairly expensive (which, granted, might be worth it if you use it), but like I mentioned in another recent thread, I think some of the pay-as-you-go plans can do per-day unlimited data, which would be a good solution for RV-ing because you probably will have wifi at many of the commercial campgrounds. A semi-permanent mount cell booster would also possibly be a good investment, if for no other reason than that an aluminium sided RV makes a pretty good Faraday cage so it’s good to have an external antenna.
ETA: Another important consideration with satellite internet is that although the download speeds are okay, the upload speed is REALLY slow and your upload limit is usually a lot more restrictive than your download one. That might be an issue for someone trying to do a lot of work over it.
Where you end up going will determine if the mobile 4G/LTE hotspot solutions are good for you. I suspect there are camping or RV forums that have information for people like you.
Satellite is out of the question for business use. The round-trip time is immense compared to other transport methods and you’ll time out if you use a VPN or Outlook Mail servers. Just avoid it.
However, in the USA, the land of the free, finding a hot spot somewhere is not that hard at all. Also, a lot of RV and camp ground “parks” have WiFi. The 4G/LTE option that was mentioned will also work but you’ll have to restrict travel to the coverage map from whatever provider. Can you pull 10mbps? Hrmm… Dunno on any occasion. A shared WiFi like at a Starbucks with all the users would be difficult to achieve a fraction of that. Same with a camp ground. Your best bet, believe it or not, would be with 4G/LTE. Like one of those MiFi hotspots you can buy. I had an instructor give a lecture over one of those and he was quite happy with it as he was able to travel about the USA with greater reliability now.
If money is no object, you can also combine several cellular connections into one WiFi hotspot with a bonding router. Give it a Verizon modem, a Sprint modem, etc., and it can combine all of them into one hotspot for you – hopefully giving you enough bandwidth and reception together.
Realistically, though, if Verizon doesn’t service an area, it’s unlikely that any other cell provider does.
My wife and I live out in the boonies and we have no choice for high speed access except satellite or cellular. Satellite was to expensive, so we decided to go with the cellular option. We use TMobile and have three devices that we use. My cellphone, my wife’s cellphone and a stand alone hotspot. With either of these devices we can use them as a mobile hotspot, so your computers can connect to them vita wifi. Each phone had 2 gigs of 4g data per month and the hotspot had ten. The reason we cost TMobile ief that when we exceed our monthly data(we always do), there is no additional charge, however we are throttled.
The good is that the 4g does is pretty quick, not dsl or cable modem speeds, but quick enough to watch video if need be. Also, we can have access pretty much wherever we go, it’s nice to have high speed access in the car for out laptop during a long . The bad is that because of the data cap watching movies or a lot of videos will eat up your data pretty quickly.
The cost isn’t too bad. I think the hotspot cost us $50 a month and the says from the cellphones if included in the phones plans. It really isn’t a bad setup, save for the video issue.