Month: September 2021

We don’t actually work from the road, but we are active in a number of areas on the internet and we do use it for video streaming for some media(TV).  We use Dish Satellite as much as possible to minimize the use of streaming bandwidth.

Back in 2016, we had an AT&T family plan that allowed up to two hotspots and a total of ten devices.  It is an unlimited plan that is network managed once we hit the limits per device spec’d in the plan.  We typically went well over the total limits but on average, it worked well so long as there was a working AT&T tower nearby.

Originally, in our 28-foot TT (travel trailer), we just used a MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) antenna stuck up against the wall or window in the trailer that plugged directly into our AT&T hotspot.  It worked well enough for our travels back then.  The external MIMO antenna did improve the reach and bandwidth of the hotspot.  It was somewhat dependent on which direction the cell tower was with respect to the trailer, so we sometimes had to move the hotspot and antenna to a different window. 

Not long after that, our daughter and her family went full time in a TT, using the same hotspot model and as a part of our family plan.  They had similar experiences.  Since her business on the road (https://designsonthego.store) involved lots of web work, but not too much streaming it was reasonably good, again so long as there was a decent AT&T cell tower nearby.  That did mean for some parks, she had to drive into town and sit and work in their car.  It also meant, one of the most important things to check off when looking for campsites was how well the cell connectivity was, in particular AT&T.  Some camping apps like Campendium try to give you a heads up on cell speeds, but the information is inconsistent at best.  Data comes from previous campers and their ratings of Good might be based on whether email worked, not on how fast complicated web pages loaded.  Cell coverage maps from the vendors aren’t much better as they only really show areas that can “see” the tower, not whether your transfers will be 5M bps or one tenth of that.  Since we are retired, we only “want” internet, our daughter “needed” internet to conduct her business.

We moved the same hotspot hardware to our Class C a couple of years later, and again to our Class A, a year after that.  Over that time, we also migrated to a new Netgear Nighhawk hotspot – again with a MIMO dual antenna external connection so we could use the MIMO-stick-on-the-wall antenna.  In order to try to improve our access, we added a cell booster and a single omni-direction antenna outside.  I found a paint extension pole and fashioned some holders out of some PVC couplers.  I had two sets of mounts -one down low on the back ladder and one up high.  The omni antenna was a trucker model with three extensions.  With the pole in the lower mount, the paint pole collapsed, the antenna was just at the top of the ladder.  If I moved the pole up to the upper mounts and extended the pole up all the way, the antenna was over 20 feet above the ground.  That was the only way we got cell in Padre Island State Park which has a huge sand dune right behind the parking area blocking the view of the distant cell tower.  

But I always felt the booster was somewhat flakey.  If I had it off and looked at signal power – then turned it on – and watched received power did go up significantly – for a few minutes.  Then it seemed to drop back down to almost where it was before.  Speeds probably increased a bit as well, but I get the feeling the tower was essentially saying – I hear you, we don’ t need to talk so loud.  I do think it helped on some quite weak, distant towers, just not so much on towers that were within a mile or few of the RV.

So, eventually I decided to try out a directional antenna.  I spent around $80 on one, ran a better grade of cable from my pole to the booster and tried out the antenna.  I would go up on the roof with my phone connected to the hotspot so I could monitor signal quality and run speed tests.  I then rotated the antenna about 1/8^th turn increments noting down signal and speeds.  Thus, I could identify towers and directions, and in theory, the best direction to point.  The theory here was to avoid slower towers with poor signal.  It didn’t work very well.  What would tend to happen is when pointed at the faster tower, it would sometimes decide to bump us off to the other tower.  Maybe because it was too busy.  But sometime after setting up, we’d experience slow traffic and sure enough we were talking to the “wrong tower”.  Worse, since it was a direction antenna – we weren’t talking at our best signal strength which does worsen transfer speeds.  So, with a directional antenna, one might think that we’d never see the other tower – but it turns out the average cell directional antenna has quite a broad range of direction it will receive a signal.  So even when pointed over 90 degrees from a tower, it could still communicate with it.  We tried the directional antenna with only mixed results in several campgrounds.  As with the omni, it might have made a difference if we were far from a single tower as, when pointed right at the tower, it would have a better signal.

So, the Netgear continued to be our router of choice, but they have this nasty habit.  The manual tells you to unplug the router when the battery is charged.  Now it is in our electronics cabinet, behind a TV and there is no way to know it is charged short of going back there and looking or logging into it.  And if we unplugged it – the same goes for plugging it back in when it needs to charge?  Why all this rigamarole?  I can only think that Netgear wanted an aggressive charge profile since they expect you to “take it with you” all the time and were too cheap to build in a proper charge controller.  The result is, people like us plug it in and leave it, which means 6 months down the road the overcharged battery expands enough that it blows the back off (which we velcro’d to the wall) and the hotspot falls to the bottom of the cabinet.  We order a new battery, install it and we are good for another 6 months.  

Then after a couple of years, it seemed the router started to get flakey – not working well or randomly rebooting.  It was time to step up to something better.

We had wanted a second cell vendor, to hopefully fill in some of the camping areas where there was no AT&T cell.  Verizon was the logical choice for us.  None of the standard Verizon plans would have been a good fit for “unlimited use” of any kind so we went looking for those magical third-party plans.  There were a dozen companies out there, but we choose Nomad Internet because they seemed like they had been around longer than most and had some serious positive reviews (also a few negative ones).  None of them looked 100% Reliable.  

We wanted a unified method of using two cell vendors, so one of those “take this router” plans wasn’t going to work for us either.  We went looking for Bring Your Own Device {BYOD} type plans.  The only one Nomad Internet had available at the time was with T-Mobile.  For $800 up front, we get 12 months of unlimited service via a router of our own choosing.  So, $66 a month seemed reasonable.  More on that below.

We wanted a “real router” and YouTube led us to PepWave and TechnoRV.  They make these industrial quality routers that admittedly are quite expensive.  They are solidly built, have lots of progamming options and can support multiple sims, single or double modems etc.  We bought a Max Transit Duo which allows four Sims, two of which can be active at any time.  Traffic can be shared across two cell connections (router distributes streams over the two connections).  Traffic can also be consolidated into a VPN pipe (SpeedFusion) and distributed across multiple connections based on the speeds of each cell connection to the internet.  It can not only use the two cell modems, but also WIFI and anything you can link to an ethernet port, like another hotspot router.  We also ordered a rooftop antenna that contained MIMO antennas for each cell modem, WIFI antennas and a GPS antenna.  

So back to sims.  The first sim we got from Nomad Internet was hard limited to 400kbps.  Sometimes we’d see more when we first connected to a tower, but within minutes bandwidth was limited to 400kbps.  Since the Pepwave was new to us and we were stationary, I couldn’t be sure the problem was with our setup or the local tower.  But eventually we moved and had the same result.  They sent us a new Sim – and we had exactly the same problem.  Again, we moved with no improvement and I requested a third Sim.  This one worked fine.  We are running all our traffic through their SpeedFusion VPN, which nicely load balances between AT&T and T-Mobile.  We are still stationary but I have no reason to think it won’t work in other locations now.  I have to say, Nomad Internet customer service is a bit, well inconsistent.  Eventually, everything was handled but I get the impression they have a group of people providing customer service and don’t do a particularly good job of tracking a customer’s issues.  It often seemed like I was re-explaining my situation to each person.

But make no mistake, we are happy with our choices of Nomad Internet and TechnoRV.

UPDATE. When we moved across country – the T-Mobile would seem to work at night when we stopped. But once we sat in a place for 24 hours – the bandwidth would be limited to around 200kbps. Big cities, small cities – it was always limited and this made it unusable, especially for the SpeedFusion service as we could talk to the tower at high speed, but most of the packets would be dropped, necessitating retransmission which just made it all the worse.

I’ve corresponded with Nomad Internet in email. They won’t or can’t answer my questions about WHY this is happening. Their only proposed solution is to send me a FOURTH SIM. I’ve requested a refund – and now they are dead silent. No response to my last emails for several days. They even implied that I was generating too much traffic and causing T-Mobile to shut me down. Most of the time, I get to the second speed test (on any particular tower) and my inbound speed is hard limited to 200kbps. When it doesn’t work, I don’t even try to use it, so I should be below ANY total bandwidth limitation.

I’ve already been to the Better Business Bureau but I expect my complaint will just be chaff in the middle of hundreds of others.

Final Update – I gave up and agreed to a FOURTH SIM. It got sent to my HOME address despite my including my current address in my approval email. When I got the SIM a week later, I installed it – and it worked great for almost exactly 24 hours. Then hard limited to a rediculously slow speed again. I basically gave Nomad Internet an ultimateum: Reasonable Refund or very unhappy customer. I had the “service” for 6 months, maybe two of them worked. They returned almost 2/3rds of my annual cost. That didn’t make me “happy”, but it was about all I expected and it was an end to a hassle.

On Feb 7^th, my credit card was charged “for another year of service”.  Yep, after cancelling the service and 6 months before my first year was up, they charged me for another year of service!  I disputed the charge and it was reversed – and I got three emails from Nomad implying that THEY reversed the charge and it would show up in 10 days.  So now I wonder, will I get a credit for that amount on my card?  No I didn’t.

So, looking at various forums around the web, this “charge early, charge twice, charge after cancellation” is a common business practice with Nomad.  If they did this often enough, they could keep tens of thousands of dollars in a slush fund to help keep the business afloat.  Just like the “sorry your internet died, will send you a new SIM or Router and it will be there in a week” routine.  

It seems to me there are a lot of Youtube influencers getting great service and advertising for Nomad Internet and too many of the rest of us are getting lousy service. In the end, I demanded a refund and got half my year cost back. And Nomad Internet seems to be sliding into a pit – screwing customers while trying to bribe Youtube celebrities to schill their product for obscene payments. Seems like another Ponzi scheme.

I immediately ordered the FMCA router based service and connected that to my PEP router, who happily uses it along with my AT&T connection, even using Speed Fusion.

There is an additional cost to use the SpeedFusion service, based on GBytes of traffic, but not a lot, maybe $20 a month more based on our usage.  

Yet another update – FMCA killed their t-mobile product, went to AT&T which was useless to me so I jumped to Starlink – which is working pretty well. I had to add portabilty so we could move about the country. Oh, and the Pep continues to work once I cleared its bug. But beware – for my max transit duo, the yearly maintenance is $200 – and you can’t get the router fixed without it and you can’t restart mainenance if you let it lapse.

One last note.  I hated thinking about drilling down through the roof (or up).  With our booster, I ran the wire down from the electronics cabinet, to floor level, out the back of the RV, over to the ladder side and up to the roof, with enough slack to extend way above the RV.  That made for a long antenna cable.  The new antenna only had about a 5-foot length of cable so it HAD to go through the roof.  I measured from a known point (shower sky light) back around the wall to the cabinet and mapped out space on the roof for the antenna.  Still, it’s scary thinking about drilling through the roof.  Then when I took down the board covering the inside top of the electronics cabinet – I was staring up right at the well-nuts that mounted one corner of a solar panel.  A large chunk of the ceiling Styrofoam insulation was missing because they gouged it out to run wiring through there.  That gave me an exact location so I could drill through the roof with confidence.  I purchased a large waterproof junction box to raise up the antenna so it would be above the solar panels, mounted the antenna and sealed it all up.

So, to recap:  $1000 for the Pepwave, $300 for the roof top MIMO/WIFI/GPS antenna and $800 for a year of T-mobile (now $50/month for FMCA)$500 for antenna $135 a month for starlink+portability, in addition to our AT&T Family Plan.  Not something I’d recommend for everyone.  Pepwave does make a line of more affordable routers than the Max Transit Duo and Nomad Internet has a range of lower cost routers that come with a non-removable Sim, so they are something to consider as well, but considering their total failure in Customer Service, I can’t recommend any of their services to anyone.  The only downside we’ve found to this setup has been since SpeedFusion shares both connections, it works as a VPN, having to use a remote server to consolidate traffic.  Hulu sees that server as a VPN and blocks service.  No other service we use seems to have a problem.  The PEPwave does have the ability to treat certain traffic differently.  For example I could have it not include my Apple TV in the SpeedFusion tunnel and thus not have the Hulu issue – but I don’t think Hulu is worth the effort. 8^} In the end, all the fancy services weren’t worth the effort or the extra bandwidth it wasted wasn’t worth it either.

Mike