Satellite Internet Access
This came in from a reader.
John Longino wrote:
My business requires that I be able to download fairly large .pdf files at least one time a day, perhaps more often. I am wondering if the only option for my family when we want to take our Lance camper and truck out on the road is to buy a self-acquiring 2 way satellite. The cost is very high, so if there is some other option, I would surely like to investigate it. Thanks!
We’ve looked at the same satellite systems and have opted against doing it for the time being. Besides being costly, the bandwidth is metered in the sense that if you exceed a certain amount of megabytes within a 24-hour period they slow down your connection. This is to prevent any one customer from hogging all the bandwidth, since the amount of bandwidth on any one satellite is finite.
For an explanation on bandwidth limitations of satellite Internet, see the bottom of this page.
I’ve seen this as an alternative to Ground Control’s RV satellite internet access.
What these guys are selling is the standard residential version of the Direcway dish, but modified so that you can mount it on a tripod and aim it yourself. You can break the whole thing down easily when you want to move the RV. And the account is a standard residential account, so you pay $59 per month instead of $99-plus a month. Plus the equipment is only $3000 versus $5000-plus for the full RV version.
It sort of “skirts the spirit” of what Direcway intended that product to do, but they don’t explicitly prohibit using the residential dish that way. However, it is an unendorsed use of the product and they won’t support any problems you might have as a result of aiming the dish.
My understanding from reading the company’s literature is that aiming is a bit of a chore. They claim after a few times, you can aim it in under 10 minutes. For us, it doesn’t make a lot of sense because we tend to move a lot and I don’t want the headache of breaking it all down every few days. But if you planned on staying in one spot for a while, it might be a good solution.
Another downside of any kind of satellite system for us is that we push a lot of large PDFs up to our server. So the upload bandwidth needs to be pretty good. With satellite Internet the bandwidth is asynchronous - the download is much higher than the upload. Upload speeds are usually only a few times better than dial-up.
Another solution I’ve been investigating recently is EVDO. It is a new protocol for transmitting data over the cellular network that is as fast as broadband. And there seems to be a few hacks you can make to your laptop settings to make it go even faster. You can read about EVDO here.
EVDO requires modification of the existing cellular network, so it is not available everywhere yet. It may not be available where you plan to travel. Verizon seems to be the largest player in the EVDO space. They offer it in about 30 cities and are charging $79.99 per month for the service. And you’ll need to shell out $100 for the card that you plug into your laptop to receive the signal.
Another thing you can do with EVDO is use a Junxion Box to share the signal.
Basically you can use it to set up a mini-network wherever you are just by plugging the card into the above device.
We’ll probably go this route when our T-Mobile contract is up in May. We’ve been very happy with the data service they are providing, but it is very slow. At best we get 19K per second, a little better than a 14.4 modem. Plus I recently switched to a Mac for my main computer and I can’t get the wireless card to work with it despite a bunch of online tutorials that say it can be done. (I have to use my cell phone instead, which is only about 9600 baud and burns up my monthly minutes.) The Verizon card/service seems to be a little more Mac friendly.
In the short-term I think the best solution is WiFi. It pretty wide-spread nowadays, including many truckstops and campgrounds. Here is an article on how we find places with WiFi.
We pick them pretty much exclusively based on if they have WiFi, or their proximity to a place that has WiFi. It is the cheapest and easiest way to get broadband while on the road.