Internet Network

[wulfraat]

Originally Posted by wwillson

AT&T may throttle your bandwidth when you go over your plan throttling threshold. The reason AT&T may throttle your bandwidth is if the RAN (Radio Access Network) you are connected to is congested. If the RAN is not congested, frankly, AT&T doesn't care how much bandwidth you use, but if it is congested, the congestion has to be managed and your device may be chosen to be throttled.



I have 12 AT&T LTE radios in various devices and I have NEVER seen throttling, even on devices that use 100GB/month. AT&T has built in intelligence about which devices they chose to throttle and likely only throttle the most offending devices.



BTW - I work for AT&T.

This is interesting. I got a text the other day from att that my hotspot on my iPhone had exceeded 15G and they would throttle hotspot related activity to 128kbs (ridiculously slow).

So you are saying that if I add a line for a dedicated hotspot device it will be treated like a regular line and only get throttled if network is congested? That would be great.

[uncle_bob]

Hi

Ok, you made me look

I appear to be paying about $24 a month for the modem gizmo on top of my normal "unlimited" plan.

Bob

[wulfraat]

Well well. After speaking with att and with the local store they both confirmed that as of May, you can no longer provision mobile hotspots onto an unlimited plan. They caught on that people were crushing data usage with mobile hotspots and you must select a crappy 10G plan for $50/month if you want to use a mobile hotspot on att network (as of today).

Bummer

[uncle_bob]

Hi

Well, that's not good news

Bob

[Gene]

You don't have to pay the high costs of Verizon, AT&T or the other two.

We have to use some sort of hot spot at our house because it is the only practical way to get internet 10 miles out of town and half a mile above it—the exurbs of Grand Junction, Colorado. We used a Verizon dedicated hotspot for several years—basically a cell phone with out the phone. We often had problems with going over or getting nervously close to the limits.

So we started checking out other carriers—they use the big 4's towers and charge less. The TracPhone type companies (mostly owned by Carlos Slim, the Mexican cellphone billionaire) had nothing for us. They seemed only interested in selling phones. Consumer Cellular uses T-Mobile or AT&T and is pretty reasonable, but you don't know what SIM card you'll get. They told me they'd send an AT&T one (it should work at our house), but they sent a useless T-Mobile card. The salesman didn't know what he was talking about, not an unusual problem at Consumer Cellular it appears. Then I only checked out companies using Verizon towers and it boiled down to Credo. We have unlimited data that throttles down at 20 Gigs/phone, so we have a potential for 40. We never come close to that, but the next plan down wasn't enough.

A lot of these companies that lease others' towers don't have much data since the plans seem to be oriented toward seniors who have trouble opening their clamshell phone, so it was quite a effort to find what we wanted. We went from 7 Gb. for data (the hotspot "phone"), a home phone system (another phone system) and one dumb phone to two credible smart phones they were trying to get rid of (Apple 7), unlimited calls, texts and data with the 20 Gb limit. It cost us about $10 more than Verizon for much, much more (I really hate carrying a phone around, but the time had come to join society). Depending on what the OP needs for that Mac, Credo might work. If you download movies, maybe not. Plans change all the time, so you have to keep searching for a while. A Verizon store employee once told me the best Verizon plans were at the end of the month, but whether that it still true I can't say. I can say Verizon will empty your wallet as fast as they can, but they do have the best network, especially in the west.

Gene

[wulfraat]

I use over 1/2 a terabyte of data over a gig connection with Comcast per month at home - I’m data hungry.

Even for short trips of 5-10 days I easily consume over 100 gigs of wireless data... so a single hotspot plan doesn’t work for me - I rotate across multiple hotspot and hotspot enabled devices to eek out all I can bandwidth wise.

I use both att and Verizon LTE radios / SIM cards in the devices to ensure I always have coverage.

It all depends how much data you need - no silver bullet on the market today for me

[uncle_bob]

Hi

I run somewhere between 300 and 600GB per month when we are at home. I'll peak over that if I get busy.

Bob

[uncle_bob]

Hi

Yet another layer to the onion:

Sitting here with the dogs, watching the world go by at the campground. Not much happening. Up pulls a truck with a Death Star logo on it. Ranger truck pulls by and they head over to one of the campsite "WiFi" setups. AT&T guy hops out and pokes at this and that.

Now I'm wondering if the campsite WiFi is just that, or if it's also a picocell array .... I suppose I *could* have walked all the way over there and asked .... way to much like work .... ... also the risk of "yup, and this little gizmo here keeps failing ... any idea who designed that? .... " ( = all of a sudden *very* much like work)

Bob

[Fair_Enough]

Originally Posted by uncle_bob

Hi

Yet another layer to the onion:

Sitting here with the dogs, watching the world go by at the campground. Not much happening. Up pulls a truck with a Death Star logo on it. Ranger truck pulls by and they head over to one of the campsite "WiFi" setups. AT&T guy hops out and pokes at this and that.

Now I'm wondering if the campsite WiFi is just that, or if it's also a picocell array .... I suppose I *could* have walked all the way over there and asked .... way to much like work .... ... also the risk of "yup, and this little gizmo here keeps failing ... any idea who designed that? .... " ( = all of a sudden *very* much like work)

Bob

And yet you bother us with this.

Yanking your chain Bob, have fun watching. I've seen those same trucks visit homes that had only DirectTV or who knows what else... nothing wireline. I figured don't ask, don't tell.
WW

[RadioCamp]

Internet aside, you mentioned that you'd be living in the 19' full-time. Airstream has long advised against this because humans exhale a lot of water vapor and moisture can accumulate in the insulation (which could lead to mold). There may well be a ventilation hack to get around this limitation -- an important thing to investigate along with connectivity issues.

[streamon]

Originally Posted by daleyocum

The Mobile Internet Resource Center should be your go-to resource. https://www.rvmobileinternet.com/

SO much info there from people who make a living on the road.

Totally agree.....super resource and lucky to have them.

Streamon

[autarkis]

Welcome to the fold! We have been full-timing with our 27' Flying Cloud for over five years now, and thought Id throw a few thoughts out.

The concerns about data usage and throttling have been covered a good bit, but a lot depends on what your full-timing will look like. Are you going to be on the road a lot? Stationary? In a park, your own land, on the road?

We were on the road in some remote places, and found that having an external antenna for cellular data was very, very helpful. It turned one bar into three bars, and three bars into five many times. It wont make a signal magically appear but it will make one stronger without requiring you to use your laptop on the roof in the rain! Make sure the antenna you get will support the frequencies your provider(s) use.

We also used an external wi-fi antenna/bridge. This allowed us to connect to other wi-fi setups, although lag and bandwidth are a real gamble on this front, it was helpful when the parks put us away from the office / wireless access points.

Also, I would recommend going with a good (paid) VPN for data security (PIA and Nord are good choices). We found ourselves visiting hotspots at coffee shops, restaurants and Home Depots across the country, and not worrying about open wi-fi at those places was worth the money, especially since as a full-timer you are more likely to be banking, etc, online.

As we had multiple devices I had a firewall set up separate from wireless, that included ad-blocking as a way to reduce the amount of data consumed. Doing software updates at the coffee shop became standard practice. I would strongly recommend looking at sites that teach about reducing data consumption, turn off automatic updates, etc to prevent unseen usage.

Finally, depending on the work your macbook is doing you may need to be concerned about power usage. If you are plugged in all the time, look in to good power protection (lots of info about that here) for your airstream. If you plan on using battery power you should investigate a pure sine wave inverter, upgraded batteries and solar.

Have fun!!

Andrew

[uncle_bob]

Hi

... umm .... errrr ..... Modern Mac laptops charge via the USB-C port on the side. Anything that will give you 5V USB power will charge them at some level. Indeed to get the full 80W that the Apple charger provides, you will need that charger. Depending on usage, a very standard 12V powered USB-3 charger may be a very adequate source of power. We both keep ours topped up that way. If you do video editing 14 hours a day .... maybe not so much ....

Bob

[gklott]

For our trailer, we have the Sierra Wireless MP70 mobile router. It is professional-grade mobile router, designed for first responders, fleet operations, and isolated worksites. The reception performance is excellent, and the WiFi speed is outstanding. It also has features such as GPS vehicle tracking, remote administration, and trailer control and telemetry . We are installing an low profile external antenna on the roof to further improve reception when we are really remote.

The router has two SIM card slots, and the router supports all carriers. Switching between installed SIMs is easy via the web interface. Physically changing SIMs is simple too. The router notifies us when we approach the 15GB/mon limit for each SIM.

For our service, we have THE NEW VERIZON PLAN UNLIMITED, which is no longer available for new accounts. Many of the forum readers may also have this plan. It is similar to the beyondUnlimited today, but the current beyondUnlimited plan costs more.

We average 80-120GB/mon.

We have 9 SIM cards (lines), 4 for family iPhones and 5 for the MP70. Cost is $110/month for the base 4 iPhone family account, and $20/line for data - total monthly bill is $305.68. We get a 5% auto pay discount and 10% veteran's discount, but it only applies to the $110 base account.

The iPhones have 22GB data/mon. We get 15GB/mon on the 5 SIMs for the MP70, and the cost is $20/SIM/mon. At $305.68/mon for the complete plan, 163GB/mon, the total data cost is $1.88/GB. We can add additional SIMs at $1.33/GB for the MP70.

This is the cheapest overall data rate we have found. If you bought Verizon's data only plan today, 100 GB is $710/mon.

We we are not traveling, we take the MP70 out of the trailer, and it is our home Internet service. We live in a rural area, and satellite would be our only option.

73/gus