RV Private WiFi Network

[iproff1]

Boyscout, I’ve been leaning toward the Verizon prepaid plan myself. Which Verizon Jetpack mifi device did you get? I’ve heard there are charging problems with the older 7730 model and reset problems with the current 8800 model. Did you purchase this from Canada or did you have to be in the US? I’d love to get this setup before I make the snowbird run this winter.

Bob

Sorry I did not see your post sooner I did purchase a 8800 model last year with 3 months included. There were many people having issues with the units most because of over charging, ie leaving it plugged in to charge all the time. As a Canadian I wanted the month to month which meant 70.00 a month not the 65.00 that you can get if you take it year round. We came home in April had internet all the way from Florida to Sarnia my wife even watched her soap through our IPTV on her tablet while driving on I75. We sold our house in June so we had to go back down to Florida to get our personal stuff and a bunch of stuff I didn't really need to bring home. I called Verizon to get our MiFI activated for June what a nightmare getting through to the right people, you can't reactivate on line a pay as you go MiFI. They told me that I could still get my unlimited plan no throttling if the phone number associated with my sim card was not taken by someone else. It was still good so they reactivated our MIfI for June 1st. We crossed the border turned it on and it worked perfect all the way to Florida and all the way home. A huge advance of the MiFi is my wife would put it in her purse and because we have a Magic Jack phone number we could use our Canadian cellphones which were on airplane mode when ever we wanted. People would call and not know if we were not at home.
I'm hoping by June Bell or Rogers will have the 8800 in Canada because I bought mine I was told I can switch carriers I will find out soon.
We didn't go to Florida this winter because of health reasons but we hope to next winter in the RV. We will be going to Winnipeg this summer so I would like to setup a network in the RV even if I can use the 8800.

Ken

[boyscout]

There are so many threads here about getting a good internet connection... this seems to be one of the more recent ones.

In some of the threads I've reported that after setting up (with the Ubiquiti Nanostation and other gear) to get best-possible connections to park wi-fi we still found park wi-fi almost universally unreliable and/or inadequate for our needs (fairly heavy email use, sometimes with document attachments, and web browsing.

I've reported that we therefore switched last year to most often using cell-based data connections using a MiFi 8800L MiFi device purchased from Verizon and their (then) truly-unlimited good-performance data plan that we got for (prepaid) $60 per month. It worked *very* well for us, last year.

When we returned to the U.S. a couple of months ago the rep in a franchise Verizon store told me that their "unlimited" data plan was now capped at 30Gb and cost $70 per month. I took the plan. However performance was only OK at the best of times (if we streamed video I think we'd have found it very frustrating) and almost every day we'd experience periods of really poor performance; 60-75 seconds to load a simple web page for example. These observations were made from the exact same location (same campsite) from which we'd had such good service a year ago.

I went to a Verizon corporate (non-franchise) store to complain. I was told after a bunch of nonsense support prattle (including the ol' swap out the SIM card BS) that there was nothing they could do to improve the service we were getting. I was further told that Verizon has no 30Gb "unlimited" plan... the rep in the franchise store had sold me their top 15Gb "unlimited" plan while telling me it was a 30Gb plan!

Off to an AT&T corporate store, purchase of another $200+ hotspot device and an 18Gb "unlimited" data plan for $75 per month prepaid which was the best plan they could offer. So far, very good and very reliable performance in southeast and south-central U.S.

In six months or a year, who knows what will be the best device/carrier/plan?!! Things sure are changing a lot, especially among cell carriers paring back their offerings, and apparently including the definition of the word "unlimited".

[geotex1]

There are so many threads here about getting a good internet connection... this seems to be one of the more recent ones.

In some of the threads I've reported that after setting up (with the Ubiquiti Nanostation and other gear) to get best-possible connections to park wi-fi we still found park wi-fi almost universally unreliable and/or inadequate for our needs (fairly heavy email use, sometimes with document attachments, and web browsing.

I've reported that we therefore switched last year to most often using cell-based data connections using a MiFi 8800L MiFi device purchased from Verizon and their (then) truly-unlimited good-performance data plan that we got for (prepaid) $60 per month. It worked *very* well for us, last year.

When we returned to the U.S. a couple of months ago the rep in a franchise Verizon store told me that their "unlimited" data plan was now capped at 30Gb and cost $70 per month. I took the plan. However performance was only OK at the best of times (if we streamed video I think we'd have found it very frustrating) and almost every day we'd experience periods of really poor performance; 60-75 seconds to load a simple web page for example. These observations were made from the exact same location (same campsite) from which we'd had such good service a year ago.

I went to a Verizon corporate (non-franchise) store to complain. I was told after a bunch of nonsense support prattle (including the ol' swap out the SIM card BS) that there was nothing they could do to improve the service we were getting. I was further told that Verizon has no 30Gb "unlimited" plan... the rep in the franchise store had sold me their top 15Gb "unlimited" plan while telling me it was a 30Gb plan!

Off to an AT&T corporate store, purchase of another $200+ hotspot device and an 18Gb "unlimited" data plan for $75 per month prepaid which was the best plan they could offer. So far, very good and very reliable performance in southeast and south-central U.S.

In six months or a year, who knows what will be the best device/carrier/plan?!! Things sure are changing a lot, especially among cell carriers paring back their offerings, and apparently including the definition of the word "unlimited".

RIGHT!?! As a road warrior, this is getting super frustrating to me, coupled with the sticks and bricks being so rural that our only land option is a 3 Meg DSL circuit that only hits 3 Meg maybe once a week! Forget about upload speed - you just start it and then go have a meal!

I just started (last week) trying another flat-fee "unlimited" cell solution - I use the quotes because it's subject to prioritization, throttling, yada, yada... I have it tethered to one of my travel routers, and am running ExpressVPN on the router and on the cell device to see if it successfully masks avoiding the throttle down. Getting a little ridiculous that 1 man needs 3 cell numbers and 3 carriers! I spent many years happy with 1 cell phone and 1 hotspot... Then came streaming!

I really need Elon Musk to get Starlink online, and offer it an non-ridiculous pricing and without choking!

[Headin Out 2]

A little pricey but here is a fairly new unlimited, unthrottled plan at https://unlimitedville.com/ We've not used but found it while doing research for DW soon to be remote work. I have an email in to see if they will sell a plan if I already own the device they rent. On the surface this looks kind of like a cable or sat TV service where you rent the equipment an select a plan. If the map of coverage is accurate it looks good. In our case the plan would be tax deductible since it's for her work. Just a thought. BTW we are still looking ! Cheers, Rich

ps, could not figure out how to make it a hyperlink, but, right click and you can see the link to go directly to the site, also if anybody is currently using the service I'd love to hear feedback !

pps guess the hyperlink issue fixed itself ! Ha !

[boyscout]

A little pricey but here is a fairly new unlimited, unthrottled plan at https://unlimitedville.com/ We've not used but found it while doing research for DW soon to be remote work. I have an email in to see if they will sell a plan if I already own the device they rent. On the surface this looks kind of like a cable or sat TV service where you rent the equipment an select a plan. If the map of coverage is accurate it looks good. In our case the plan would be tax deductible since it's for her work. Just a thought. BTW we are still looking ! Cheers, Rich

That looks interesting, but very pricy. We write it off too, but that doesn't mean we're not paying for it, just that we're paying with pre-tax dollars.

One thing I noted is that only one of the devices they're offering is battery-powered, and it doesn't seem to be the one offered with the unlimited plans.

It's not unusual for us to take our hotspot with us to somewhere away from the trailer so we can have reliable and fairly-secure internet there. We also sometimes - only occasionally - are not plugged in to 120V power, which a small inverter would overcome but that's another expense and installation hassle to cover us for a small portion of our needs.

We really prefer a portable battery-powered device for these reasons. The Netgear 1100-something I got from AT&T claims to have 24-hour battery life! It has held up to about 8 hours of use with life left in it.

Thanks for the tip.

[KamFlyer]

We maintain 2 usable methods of wireless internet when down south. There are some areas we frequent where either Verizon or AT&T don't have coverage but very few where neither have coverage.
For home we have 2 Telus smartphones sharing a Canada/US roaming plan that has 25GB of sharable data. We also have a Telus hotspot device that also can share the same data when in Canada. While we can tether off the phones while down south, we can't use the hotspot.
When in the states, as our primary connection, we have a Verizon 7730 on an unthrottled unlimited data plan that we got through a reseller. The device cost IIRC was $60 and the monthly usage is also $60. The company warrants the device for life as well. We had to exchange it a couple of times last year but all good so far this year. When we return to Canada we just call them up and let them know and they stop the billing until we tell them to start it up again.
For our wired connections, we use a GL-iNet AR750S running in repeater mode.
Other than the occasional place where the towers are overloaded (Quartzsite in January), this solution has worked very well so far. The only thing lacking is Captive Portal access but we seldom stay in such locations so that hasn't been an issue.

[boyscout]

We maintain 2 usable methods of wireless internet when down south. There are some areas we frequent where either Verizon or AT&T don't have coverage but very few where neither have coverage.
For home we have 2 Telus smartphones sharing a Canada/US roaming plan that has 25GB of sharable data. We also have a Telus hotspot device that also can share the same data when in Canada. While we can tether off the phones while down south, we can't use the hotspot.
When in the states, as our primary connection, we have a Verizon 7730 on an unthrottled unlimited data plan that we got through a reseller. The device cost IIRC was $60 and the monthly usage is also $60. The company warrants the device for life as well. We had to exchange it a couple of times last year but all good so far this year. When we return to Canada we just call them up and let them know and they stop the billing until we tell them to start it up again.
For our wired connections, we use a GL-iNet AR750S running in repeater mode.
Other than the occasional place where the towers are overloaded (Quartzsite in January), this solution has worked very well so far. The only thing lacking is Captive Portal access but we seldom stay in such locations so that hasn't been an issue.

Thanks Rob. Do you have a link to the reseller that sells the Verizon unlimited plan? Verizon itself doesn't do that anymore.

[Jims94vmx]

I stumbled upon an interesting find. If you have decent WiFi at campground you can turn on WiFi hotspot on windows 10 and set up a network that is password protected. I wanted to be able to use my phone and the Roku app for remote. Will not work on public network, but it will now by setting up using laptop.

This now has me thinking, how to do that with Android and/or running that paired somehow with old Asus router.

[Jims94vmx]

https://www.howtogeek.com/214080/how...wi-fi-hotspot/

[Jims94vmx]

Another interesting find. I am able to use my old Asus router and plug my phone into it via USB tethering, then made my own private network. I really don't want another data plan, so.....

https://www.snbforums.com/threads/sh...ng.9624/page-2