Internet on the Road

Lots of people have questions about our on-the-road internet setup.  Here's the current state of affairs.  (Warning – this gets a little technical and messy. I'm an electronic engineer, so I like that stuff.)  There are some tips at the end for simplifying the setup to be easier to use and understand.

First, read our old blog post about getting connected…

Our current setup all comes from 3gstore.com  (great selection of stuff, excellent service – been buying from them for years)

Starting on the outside of the trailer, we have a couple of these antennas.

We had the
Airstream dealer mount them and run the wires into the trailer. We used 10'
wires like these.

These wires are available in longer lengths
depending on your mounting location and so forth. 10' was plenty for us. These
cables have an "FME" connector (to connect to inside stuff) on one
end, and an "N" connector (like the outside antenna) on the other
end.

In this situation, I recommend NOT getting the
"Ultra Low Loss" cables. You can't really tell from the pictures on
the site, but those cables are HUGE – about the diameter of a (small) garden
hose. I didn't want to be drilling those gigantic holes in the trailer and I
didn't want to be trying to work with that extremely-thick not-too-flexible
cable. The cables above are just "low loss" not "ultra low
loss". They work just fine.

Those antennas are great for several things:

1. Boosting campground WiFi
2. Boosting 3G service
3. Boosting 4G/LTE service

They work over a broad frequency range so
they're good for all of those applications. However, you can't install any kind
of switch to let one antenna do all of those things, so you'll need to decide
if you want to run 1, 2, or 3 antennas (depending on what you want to boost) or
be swapping antenna leads around as you change modes on the road. I went for 2
antennas – one for WiFi and one for 3G/4G/LTE.

Inside the trailer, we have a PepWave
Surf-on-the-go WiFi router to create our secure, in-the-trailer WiFi network. This
lets all our devices (2 laptops, 2 iPads, 2 iPhones, Mac Mini, Xbox) connect to
the same, secure, private WiFi network all the time. We don't have to go around
changing all our devices every time we are near a different WiFi hotspot. All
our devices can use this to share one 3G/4G USB datacard. Ours is like this
one.

The good things about this router are:

1. It's small, reliable, and easy to set up.
2. It supports WiFi as WAN – which means it
   can connect to campground WiFi and use that as the internet connection when it
   is available. This also provides a firewall that keeps us secure from other
   users on the campground WiFi.
3. It supports an external WiFi antenna. This
   gives MUCH stronger signal on campground WiFi than we'd get on our laptops
   inside the metal trailer. In our tests this weekend, that translated into
   5x-10x faster speeds from campground WiFi and much better reliability.

Weaknesses are:

1. It doesn't support the kind of protocol
   that would let you do file sharing between machines across the local WiFi
   network.
2. It has only one USB port, so you can only
   have one 3G/4G card connected at a time. Some other models will connect 2 or 3
   devices at a time, and can load-share between them. (However, those other
   devices all have some other limitation that disqualified them for me – like no
   WiFi as WAN, or requiring 2 or 3 external antennas, or not supporting external
   antennas at all.)
3. The user interface screens give pretty
   simple and primitive information. I'd like to see more about my connection –
   particularly whether I'm connected to 3G or LTE, for example.

In our setup, one of the external antennas is
connected to the antenna port on the PepWave. That requires an adapter to match
up the incoming antenna cable to the PepWave connector. 3G store will sell you
the right one depending on your setup. This means the PepWave is always using
the outdoor antenna for WiFi.

For data cards, we actually carry 3. Verizon
UML290 LTE/4G/3G, AT&T Sierra Wireless LTE/3G/4G, and Sprint… something. We
carry these because we want to have a shot at a good connection no matter where
we are. Having all three gives us a better chance, and also allows us to spread
our use out over multiple data plans so we don't go over our limit on just one
card. We work online every day from the road, so we use a LOT of data.

That being said, we are planning to drop the
Sprint card. We've been all over the US and the Sprint connection has always
been worse than the other two. More often than not, we can't get a decent
Sprint connection at all. Verizon is clearly the champ in our experience. We've
been all over the US except the Northeast (check our map) and Verizon beats
AT&T pretty consistently in terms of signal strength and availability. Sometimes,
though, it doesn't work at all and we're glad to have AT&T as a backup.

The datacard plugs into the PepWave (or 3G
store may sell you a USB extension cable that lets you put the datacard farther
from the PepWave router for better signal).

So, to recap where we are so far in our
discussion, we've got an external antenna connected to a PepWave router – which
boosts campground WiFi, and we have datacards we can plug into the PepWave router
for when we don't have campground WiFi.

Now, things get tricky, but we could also stop
here. The 3G/4G datacards will work just fine plugged into the PepWave.

But, we want more range and more speed. There
are several ways to get that and they're all a little ugly.

First, you could get another one of those
external antennas and the proper antenna adapter cable for your data card. Plug
the external antenna into your data card (which is plugged into the PepWave)
and you get stronger, better signal and a faster connection.

To take it another level, you can add booster
amplifiers. This part gets very very messy. Here's why:

First, you need to decide what you want to
boost. Sometimes you get LTE/4G service, sometimes you get 3G service. Sometimes
you get older-than-3G service (booooo). Different amplifiers are required for
LTE versus 3G and below. Only one amplifier can be connected to an external
antenna at a time. Only one can be connected to your 3G datacard at a time. So
– if you wanted to boost both 3G and LTE signals, you'll be swapping cables
around a lot – switching the external antenna cable between 3G and LTE amplifiers,
and switching the antenna cable on your datacard between amplifiers.

Making matters worse, most of the antenna
connectors on the datacards are tiny, clunky, and fragile. There's a special
note on the 3G store site warning how easy it is to break the connector on the
Verizon UML290 card. UGH. I'm careful.

Not only are different amplifiers required for
3G vs 4G/LTE, but different amplifiers are required for Verizon LTE and
AT&T LTE. Each amplifier is around $200. Knock yourself out… 🙂

http://3gstore.com/product/3580_cellphone-mate-direct_connect_4g_lte_amplifier.html

http://3gstore.com/product/3877_cellphone-mate_att_direct_connect_4g_lte_amplifier.html

http://3gstore.com/product/156_wilson_3-watt_2g_3g_direct_connect_amplifier_811201.html

For 3G (and also cell phone) boosting, there
is another option. Instead of connecting the amplifier to your datacard with a
cable, you can get a signal booster that uses a little indoor antenna that you
put near your data card (or cell phone) to boost the signal. These don't give
as much boost as direct connect, but you're also not futzing around with tiny,
fragile connectors on datacards.

Hopefully, they'll get this sorted out
eventually. For now, we have 3 amplifiers:

1. An LTE amplifier for Verizon
2. A 3G-and-below direct-connect amplifier that
   will work for Verizon or AT&T on 3G connections (but doesn't help on faster
   LTE connections), and 
3. A 3G signal booster to use with our cell
   phones to help us get cell service when we're out in the boonies. The 3G signal
   booster is actually our old Wifi-in-Motion setup (which has its own little
   roof-mounted antenna) so altogether we have 3 antennas on the roof for
   3G/4G/LTE/WiFi/Cell phone boosting.

I have to first fire it up and find out what
kind of signal we're going to use:

• Verizon LTE: Use the Verizon card connected to
  the LTE amplifier. Connect the external antenna to the LTE amplifier.
• Verizon 3G: Use the Verizon card connected to
  the 3G amplifier. Connect the external antenna to the 3G amplifier
• AT&T LTE: Use the AT&T card connected
  straight to the external antenna (since I don't have an AT&T LTE amplifier.
• AT&T 3G: Use the AT&T card connected
  to the 3G amplifier. Connect the external antenna to the 3G amplifier.
• Sprint (hah, pretty much never): Use the
  Sprint card and the 3G cell phone booster (old WiFi in Motion).
• Phone calls: Use the 3G cell phone booster to
  extend range.

Advantages: With this setup, we get really
good speed, range, and reliability in a bunch of different places, we have the
ability to get maximum advantage from campground WiFi when it's available, and
we can spread our data usage across several plans.

Disadvantages: We have a spaghetti mess of
cables, amplifiers and boosters in our cabinet, and I'm constantly having to
juggle cables between antennas, amplifiers, and data cards to adapt to our
situation. It gets pretty complicated.

This can be simplified if you only go with one
data card, and/or if you skip the booster amplifier. It can be simplified
further by forgoing the outside antennas and just using the PepWave with the
data cards. In that scenario, you're almost ahead to simply use a MiFi or
similar 3g/4g portable pocket router. The only thing those don't do as well is
the WiFi- as WAN for campground WiFi.