A wifi extender and a hotspot walk into a bar…
I’m terrible at jokes! I know a lot of you are wondering “how do you do your job successfully while working from the road…?” and the answer is… a hotspot, wifi extender and a hotspot booster! When we were first prepping the RV for our road trip, I read hundreds of blog posts about the best wifi and internet options that are available to RV’ers. To be honest, it was a LOT of work and I didn’t find one specific blog post that gave me my answer. My hope is that my blog post will be your one and only answer!
Click here to jump to the products we purchased- if you purchase from the affiliate links below, we get a small commission from Amazon and greatly appreciate it! If not, no biggie.. let us know what you decide to buy instead!
Let’s start with the basics- we work remote in corporate America and we need to stream live video on Microsoft Teams (that isn’t choppy). We were also using around 500 GB when we were living at home. It’s a steep amount but that was with us running 2 nest cameras (with nest aware – which uses on average around 300 GB to store video), streaming music, Netflix and multiple laptops in the house. When we started doing research, everyone was recommending an unlimited Verizon or AT&T hotspot. The issue is when you read the fine print, most of these companies will throttle your data after a certain amount of GB meaning you get slower speeds. We also visited both retailers and they no longer offer a truly unlimited plan, so most of the blogs I read were grandfathered in. We were pitched to buy an AT&T mobile plan and add a hotspot to the plan. The issue? We already have a great mobile plan that is affordable and that we love. We use Mint Mobile and it’s unlimited everything for $30 a month (for 2 phones!!). They use Sprint and T-Mobile towers so we have the same service as anyone else. It’s also owned by Ryan Reynolds if you needed any additional convincing. Needless to say, AT&T did not have a plan that affordable and the hotspot would still have been throttled.
We continued to do research and found that a few people were having success with having 2 different carrier plans and hotspotting their phone data. We’ve tried using our cell phone hotspot on our laptops before and had issues with stable connection but it was looking like our best course of action at this point. The next phase of researching was around wifi boosters and extenders. The difference between these two is simple, one boosts the wifi (making speeds faster) while the other extends the reach (making wifi available further from the source). We knew we would be staying at RV parks during the week for more stable service and hopefully better WiFi but heard a lot of horror stories about RV park wifi. We decided to purchase a wifi extender as a backup plan if we couldn’t use our cell phone data. This would atleast allow us to pick up whatever quality wifi the park may have. We opted for the Winegard Wifi Extender (link below) without the data plan (it was way too expensive, had a long term contract and we heard the connection wasn’t great).
We were just a few weeks out from our “move” date and both of us were still feeling uneasy about working remote from the van. We talked to our cousin who lives in a 5th wheel full time and she told us about her data plan. Enter Netgear Nighthawk and some random company called Bix Wireless. Bix is a third party company that uses devices (hotspots) from other companies and piggy backs off of other companies towers. We did some research and couldn’t find much information about them. That’s probably because they’re awesome and my fellow RV friends will hate me for sharing this blog post.. but I just want to share the love for high internet speeds and unlimited data! They offer a variety of plans but we opted for the $179 a month unlimited AT&T plan. It’s expensive and way more than we pay for fiber at home.. but we HAVE to have reliable signal to make RV life work.
Is it unlimited?
Short answer, yes. Long answer, if you abuse it they will cancel your services. They have a separate abuse policy that I would recommend reading but the high level takeaway is don’t try to be a professional gamer with their plan.. that’s not an issue for us as we’re mostly working on our laptops and occasionally watching an episode of Grey’s on Netflix. Since we aren’t using Nest cameras in the van, our actual data usage is much lower than when we were living at home but we also haven’t noticed any throttling issues. The last thing we decided to buy was a hotspot booster from Netgear that connects to the Nighthawk and boosts the signal. We’ve been able to pick up and extra bar or two when we plug into that.
How’s it going?
So far so good.. there have been a few towns where we haven’t had ANY service on any of our devices like St. Mary, Montana and Mt. Hood, Oregon. We try not to stay in dead zones at all, but if we do it’s usually during the weekends while we’re boondocking and don’t care if we don’t have signal. Otherwise we’ve both been able to take Teams meetings at the same time with no internet lags.
I seriously hope this post solves all of your wifi and internet problems and you don’t have to spend decades searching for solutions online!
Products we purchased:
Wifi Extender – Winegard Wifi Extender – $200
We have this attached to the roof of our RV and have been able to pick up wifi at the opposite side of the RV park that we couldn’t connect to otherwise.
Hotspot- Netgear Nighthawk – $259
This is how we get our internet! We purchased it from Bix as a part of our bundle and you simply insert the sim card and start working!
Hotspot Booster- Netgear Mimo – $50
This connects to our hotspot and helps boost the signal (it actually works too).
