Internet on the road
If I work remotely from a travel trailer.. how do I get high speed internet access so I’m still productive at work?
First off, massive shout out to the Mobile Internet Resource Center. Their site and videos were instrumental in helping me pick the equipment and service. Check out their site for much, much more detail.
Xscapers
We need high speed internet for my job and Alice’s Etsy business. For mobile internet in an RV, there’s generally three options: campground wifi, satellite, and cellular.
Campground Wifi
In our experience, the campground wifi is hit or miss. You could be super far away from the access point and have little or no connectivity or you could be right next to one. Most of the times we’ve had campground wifi, it’s been about 5 Mbps or less. This is fine for most browsing, email, and sometimes 480p video.
We tend to look for campgrounds with WiFi to try to save our cellular data, but we don’t typically fully rely on the campground wifi.
Satellite Internet
The main player here is Starlink. Now they have service available all over the United States, and they have a mobility option. Just it’s $599 for the equipment + $150/mo. And it works best with a clear line of sight to the sky, so it won’t work in all campgrounds or certain spots. We’re still considering this, because I want to play Call of Duty with my friends 😂.
Cellular
This is the main route we took. Cellular is available all over, and there’s plenty of options for capabilities and equipment. I wanted 5G connectivity for when we’re in areas that actually have 5G coverage.
We ended up getting a Peplink BR1 Pro 5G cellular router and Mobility 42G 4x4 antenna. At the time of writing, these are available for $999 and $299 respectively.
This allows us to connect to 5G/4G LTE cellular networks, and campground wifi from the router. I can keep all of our devices secured on our network instead of on a public network. It’s worked pretty well so far! Especially when I’m hard wired into it, I‘d imagine a separate access point would help.
I have two SIM cards installed, but since it only has one cellular modem, it can only connect to one service at a time. I have a Verizon 5G hotspot service with 150GB of data, and pay around $288/mo for 2 phone lines, 2 phone payments, 2 tablet lines, and the hotspot. I also have AT&T Business Wireless Broadband with 100GB of data at 25Mbps for around $68/mo. It depends on our usage, because sometimes I download games, but we often hit the limits.
In our last rig, I installed the antenna so that the cables and router were hidden. I’m still trying to figure out where to install the antenna in the new rig, so keep an eye out for that blog!