it's been two years since our last internet video and we know that two years is a long long time in the technology world a lot has changed since then namely we've got 5g now is a lot more prevalent we've also got starlink which is really really cool so today we're going to get into how we have used those new technologies and our internet setup for very reliable mobile internet i can't believe it's been two years already since we upgraded to this guy right here this is our peplink pepwave max transit duo obviously you can see it's not hooked up right now because it's been replaced with an upgrade we're going to get into that per usual these kind of videos tend to run really really long i like to include as much as i can without going too far into the weed so it's not a two hour video but it may be long so we're going to have this broken down into sections and we're going to have links down below in the timeline where you can actually jump to a particular section if you want to the sections that we're going to cover are a mobile internet overview from basic to advanced i like to include those just so we kind of have a level set for when we talk about some of the more advanced topics we're also going to jump into data plans and how data usage and the type of usage that you do affects those then we're going to get into our current setup we're going to go through all that gear and equipment and antennas and all that cool stuff and how we use it currently then i'm going to jump briefly into some multi-line topics and how you can use more than one line to increase your reliability of internet including things like failover and bonding and all that cool stuff before we jump into it i want to give a shout out and a high high praise and recommendation to the mobile internet resource center this is rvmobileinternet.com we'll have a link down below we're not affiliated with them in any way i just really believe in what they're doing if you're not familiar this is chris and cherie from technomatia they've been on the road for like i don't know 15 years something crazy like that they've got a bus and a boat and a van but they have really lived and breathed mobile internet that entire time and they created this resource and they now have a whole team of experts that are creating content and constantly researching and finding out what's coming out what's new they're constantly testing it's just a superb resource now they do have a free section on the mobile internet resource center but they also have a paid version called mobile internet aficionados i highly recommend that that's where you can get to some of the premium content when you do join the mia the mobile internet aficionados you become part of their what i call alert system they don't call it that that's just what i call it i call it that because it alerted me to when at t was about to cancel their att or what they unlimited plan i forget what it's called but they were going to change to a hard throttle plan and because of them i was able to jump on and lock in that plan i've had that plan now locked in for the last four years and thank goodness i did but my point here is that their newsletter their alerts will make sure you stay on top of everything mobile internet without you having to stay on top of everything mobile internet because quite honestly that's impossible another thing i really love about their site is a mobile video course they have now that will actually take you from the very very beginning and kind of build build build on your knowledge until you have a good understanding of mobile internet because it's a very complex topic a side note on those guys we had them on our carpool lane live a couple of months ago as technomatia but we're going to have them on in a couple of weeks and we're going to jump into all this mobile internet stuff so if you have questions as i go through this of course put them down below but maybe also cue them up for our live in a couple of weeks and you know of course we'll be announcing that on our community tab and social media so keep an eye out for that but that's going to be a good time and we're going to get through a lot of information with them throughout this video i'm going to be throwing out some terminology so i want to get some of that out of the way up front so you're going to hear me say things like memo nemo stands for multiple in multiple out and that really refers to a modem's ability to talk to a tower on more than one frequency at the same time it basically allows like it's like picking up four or five handsets at the same time being able to talk all at once the more connections you have the better throughput and things like that so you're going to hear that term memo you're also going to hear me talk about lte and 5g lte is basically 4g you could think of that as just the fourth generation you might also hear a term called lte a which is just kind of an advanced form of 4g which allows for carrier aggregation again as they improve these technologies and give them new names they just kind of build on them 5g is just the latest fifth generation of mobile internet technologies and of course that just there's no other fancy names for that just 5g i also want to touch on data speeds and terminology when we're talking about bits versus bytes a lot of your speed testing apps are going to measure things in megabits per second whereas a lot of your data plans are going to be measured in megabytes or gigabytes now the difference here is a bit is a single tiny one or zero and that's one little bit of information a byte is eight bits so whenever you're trying to convert between the two you know you might be doing a speed test and think okay um i'm running this speed and it's you know 10 megabits how fast will that eat through my 10 megabytes of data you know so you kind of want to be able to understand the difference between a bit and a byte a bit is denoted with a small b lowercase b and a byte is denoted with an upper case b so whenever you see m b small or m b big it's mega bit versus megabyte another thing you're going to hear fairly frequently when you're talking about mobile internet is latency and sometimes you'll see this as like a ping and what i mean by that is latency is the time it takes for a single packet of data to leave your computer go wherever it's going google whatever and then come back usually this is measured in milliseconds or one thousandth of a second now you might think why would you care about that well when you load a web page for instance that really comes into play because it's not just one request going out to get that right when you say i want to go to netflix.com your browser first has to go and request netflix.com who is that i got to get an
address for them it has to get that back then it has to go to netflix and say hey i want to load your web page that web page is going to come back and give a bunch of information and then it's going to go and look for other sites to get all the images there's quite a few connections involved whenever you're just doing something as simple as loading a web page so that latency if it's large can make a difference in how fast your page loads another thing that's not really a term but it's going to come into play as we talk about all of these different things is wired versus wireless you're going to see a lot of these things where we have you know inside your rv where we got a hot spot or a phone whenever something is wired it's always much much better than wireless so we're going to see some things where we talk about connecting this to this wirelessly and wired wired is always better so let's talk about a bit of an overview of the types of internet that you can have when you're on the road in your rv i'm going to basically be going through our iteration of upgrades as we've done through the years because we've done this ourselves you know we started out really basic with hot spots and moved up so let's start there the first thing is your phone but your phone is a good example of a really basic hotspot if you've got that ability through your data plan and through your carrier your phone basically it connects out to the cellular world right through its antennas to the cellular tower down the road and then it broadcasts wi-fi and then you can connect to that from your computer from other phones things like that you can basically share the connection that's a really basic hotspot now i mentioned wired versus wireless a lot of your phones you can plug in your little lightning cable here plug it into the usb on your computer and you can use it that way that's called tethered what it does is it eliminates that one wireless connection and one point of potential failure from radio interference a step up from that would be a dedicated hotspot not a phone but something like this or this or this as you can see we have several we've tried out several we've used several this is a netgear hotspot that came with our with an att plan and this is kind of an advanced version of using your phone this is dedicated and designed to use as a hotspot and it's the same idea it's talking to the mobile towers and it has a wi-fi hotspot built into it so you can connect to it over wi-fi now some of these allow you to tether connect over usb some do not but the idea there is the same additionally one thing you get with one of these that you won't get with your phone is a lot of these have antenna ports so you can use something like this which is a two port memo antenna stick it to your window and it can greatly improve your reception for that matter you can take this whole thing and stick it in your window chris and sri talk about i think it's called a soap dish upgrade or something like that you get one of those little suction cup soap dishes stick it on the wall pop this in it and that way it's sitting right in your window the next step up from that would be something like this a hot spot with a dedicated router now this is our old wi-fi ranger they don't sell this anymore uh wi-fi ranger company still does sell one like this i think it's called the spruce but the idea here is this now becomes your hub of connectivity this is your wi-fi whenever you connect your apple tvs or phones or computers or whatever to your wi-fi they connect to this and then this in turn through usb connects to one of your hotspots the advantage there is if you do have multiple plans which we do highly recommend because mobile internet is all about having multiple options it's all about diversity of connections so we've had these you know kind of things for a long time this is a verizon hotspot but the nice thing there is as you swap out hotspots you're not having to go around to all of your devices and change their wi-fi connection additionally the wi-fi in these the quality of it is usually quite a bit better than in some of these devices these guys whenever we would connect to these directly i would have to reboot them sometimes a couple of times a day just to kind of reset their radios and get them to work better on wi-fi sometimes the wi-fi and these are good sometimes they're just not that great another advantage of a device like this is they typically have built-in ethernet now i mentioned wired versus wireless no different here right i also want to talk about boosters now we did a video on one a few years ago and since we upgraded to this and got an external antenna we have not even gotten the booster out of the box down there but basically what a booster does it it's good for very specific situations but the idea here is whenever you have antennas receiving a signal from a tower the higher you can get this in the air the better so you're not going to stick this outside but you might be in a situation where you're far away from the tower and you've got to get your antenna up on a pole and that's what a booster does it has a antenna on a pole outside and then it comes into a repeater and then you've got an internal antenna all it's doing is taking your signal from that tower to your devices inside and acting as an intermediary and taking the signals from way up high rebroadcasting them inside taking your signals from inside re-broadcasting them out on the antenna so it works really well for very specific circumstances when you're far away from the cellular antennas the big problem with boosters is their single channel so you might have this guy here that's got four antennas and all this memo lte advanced carrier aggregation stuff built into it and you connect it to a booster it can actually degrade your performance if this thing is already receiving a signal we've seen situations where somebody has a booster setup all the time and that's simply not the way to go a booster a lot of the time while may give you a much stronger signal might decrease your actual data throughput because it only has one channel but that is why we have not used our booster in about two maybe three years now the next step up from that is something like this this is an integrated cellular router and in fact this has two modems in it i think i didn't mention the term modem but modem just stands for modulator demodulator basically allows you to talk to other systems it's a very generic term but when i say modem in this sense i'm talking about a cellular modem that is designed to talk to a cellular network the advantage of having a built-in modem is you're not talking from one device to another like you are with this it's all integrated right in here additionally most of the devices like this have the option to put in multiple sim cards for each modem meaning with a click of a button i can change carriers without having to actually swap out things or swap out sim cards so super easy carrier switching also some of these like this one have more than one modem some have one and i'm going to show you one of those in a minute but the nice thing there is it can do automatic failover if at t has a hiccup and goes down and you're also connected to verizon it can switch over automatically even the single modem units like this can switch over automatically but it's much slower you'll also notice that this has ethernet just like these guys so you can connect directly to them this particular one has one lan and one lan port lan is just your local network local area network and you'll usually connect this to a switch and then to other devices like your computers network attached storage things like that whereas the wan port is designed to connect to a wide area network or something connected to the internet we'll get more into that when i talk about some of our current equipment another benefit of these is these are designed to run 24 7. you know they put these devices in like police cars ambulances first responders things like that they use these these are tough they're rugged they're designed to be used in a mobile situation and beyond all the time it's also very easy to connect external antennas most of these do come with these little blade antennas that you can put on here and quite honestly these antennas have a really good quality reception even if you have them inside your rv or you can be like us and you can use an external antenna on the roof or on a pole and then just plug them in right here these also typically have external antennas for your wi-fi also but we're going to get into more of that when we talk about our current setup and the other the newest kid in the game is starlink you can see it right over here we have our starlink setup we've been testing out starlink and in our video two years ago i talked about starlink and i said ah it's not even a thing yet it's a thing now and you may have seen a lot of videos on that i'm going to touch on it briefly and talk about how we integrated it but you can use starlink on its own it's not great and i'll get into why but it's a very simple device you've got this router that sits right here and you've got an antenna that goes on the roof and you've got a line that runs from the antenna to the starlink and then from the starlink to power and that's it this little device right here has its own built-in wi-fi and you connect to it and it works great it does have some limitations though and i'm going to talk more about those so let's talk data plans you know all this hardware might seem a little confusing and it can be but once you understand it it's not so bad but quite honestly the hardware part of it once you decide on what you're going to get that's the easy part because connecting things up hardware is hardware data plans on the other hand are where the real pain comes in the reason it's so painful is you got really read the fine print there are a ton of options out there that are unlimited the trouble is everybody's version of unlimited is a little bit different and none of them are really truly unlimited the reason i say that is because most of your unlimited plans have some sort of data cap on them meaning you can use a bazillion gigabits of data but after your first 20 gigabytes as an example we're going to throttle you to like 128 kilobits or we're going to throttle you to you know standard definition streaming or one megabit per second or something along those lines those data caps usually come in two different types either a hard throttle data cap meaning as soon as you hit your limit you are throttled no matter what so as soon as you hit your 20 or 25 or 22 or whatever it is you're going to be throttled to a very specific and very low speed and now they also have a sort of soft data cap or a network management data cap and that's what our att plan is and what that is is you have a certain amount of guaranteed high speed data such as 20 gigabytes i think is what ours is after that 20 gigabytes you're subject to network management and all that means is if you know there are 20 of us here in this rv park we're all using at t and i've reached my data cap of 20 gigs or whatever and somebody else has it and we're both trying to compete for bandwidth on this congested tower i'm going to get de-prioritized because i've passed my cap now in reality what we've seen on this over the past four or five years on the road is that i don't ever notice a throttle it seems to always work but the nice thing about it is and i think this is the way they should all be but you know that's just me they're basically saying hey we've got the bandwidth you can have it and you can use it and if we don't we're going to throttle you and to me that's fair and that's more of an unlimited uh than anything and then of course the next step up is a truly unlimited on throttle and those are like unicorns those are very rare but they can be found and we're going to get into those so how much data do you need and do you really need unlimited internet well it really depends on how you're going to use the internet now if all you're going to do is check email browse the web look at websites and not do a lot of streaming you might be completely fine with one of those hard capped 20 gigabit plans or something along those lines but if you're like us and you do a lot of streaming you know we watch youtube like everybody else you're watching youtube right now we also have apple tvs and we stream all of our content all of our normal tv you know we've got hbo discovery every every broadcaster out there now has a streaming platform some better than others but you can stream just about everything now and we've been doing streaming only no cable provider for over four years now and it's been great but that streaming really goes through data a standard definition stream which of course is one of the lowest qualities is going to use about three megabits per second and you're going to go through about a gigabyte an hour hd or 1080p programming which to me is kind of like the the new low minimum but it's what we watch most of the time now you're going to use about five megabits per second so that kind of tells you what kind of speed you need and you're going to go through about three gigabytes in an hour uhd streaming or 4k streaming we've not done a lot of we're going to be playing a little more with that but that requires a lot of bandwidth you're going to need about 25 megabits per second which is pretty fast and you're gonna go through a ton of data about seven gigabytes an hour is what i read online but the way these things work is when you're streaming content if you're watching something like the news or most of the frame is staying still and you've just got talking heads that's not using a lot of data if you're watching the latest top gun where there's lots of movement and things going on that requires more data more stuff is going on the screen so more stuff that's coming across the internet to get to your tv but the takeaway here is that you need a lot of data if you're going to stream your content and quite honestly most of the plans from the carriers themselves from your verizon from your at t even though they're unlimited they're most of them are hard capped throttles and after you've watched just a few shows you know you could watch maybe three four five movies boom you're at your cap and now you're being throttled to standard definition or worse so most of your plans directly from the carriers just simply aren't going to cut it luckily there are some options out there the problem is they're changing constantly and this again is where the mobile internet resource center comes in because we get asked all the time about this what's the best plan and honestly i don't know i know the plans that we have most of them you can't get anymore our att plan you just can't get it anymore it's been gone for five years and sorry there's not much you can do about it the good news is there are some data plans out there that either have very very high cap like 800 gigabyte or a thousand gigabytes or they're truly unlimited now these are going to cost more than your standard plans from the actual carriers we know where those are usually like 20 30 40 50 bucks a month most of these are in the 120 to 160 range a month but when you need the data you need the data and back to the mobile internet resource center they are the best resource to figure out what are the current best data plans they have a page that they update i believe monthly or when something new comes out i'll link to that down below if there's breaking news like hey this great plan that's been available for a couple years is going away that's when you really really want to be a member of the mia or the mobile internet aficionados so that you can be notified immediately we have a mix of plans right now one of them is at t that i mentioned we've had got a grandfather plan that's like 20 bucks a month that's like gold we also have a plan through mobile must have all the gear we're going to talk about we have our partner mobile must have sells all that stuff and they can actually help you kind of get in line with what you need for your situation but they have all that stuff and when you buy your gear through them you also have access to their data plans so you can purchase those another resource we have is called easy mobile data that's who our verizon plan is with it's hit and miss you know it's tough to find one company that has everything so you got to kind of look and see what's out there and pick what's best for you enough about data plans let's jump into our gear and what we're running right now now i'll preface this and say that this crazy setup that we have is mainly so that we can test different options and try things out try new products try new technology so this isn't going to be for everybody except for maybe some of the core pieces if you're enjoying this content please give us some love by clicking that thumbs up please subscribe if you haven't already those are indicators to youtube that our content is good and should be recommended to others so we really appreciate it the first piece we're going to talk about replace this guy this is the max transit duo the new device we have is called the max transit pro and it's almost identical to this it's the exact same box if you looked at the two side by side you probably couldn't tell the difference unless you looked on the back here but the biggest difference is they both have dual modems the this one has dual cat 12 modems it's just a category of modem they're both lte meaning they're 4g the difference is our newer one has an upgraded modem it's been upgraded from cat 12 to cat 7. now that might not seem like an upgrade going from 12 to 7 but the biggest difference there is category 7 modems support band 71 which is a t-mobile band that has become very popular because it has a i think 600 megahertz and it reaches a long way meaning it's very good for rural areas and it works really really well far from the tower it also has wi-fi six technology which i assume is better than wi-fi five i don't really know a whole lot about it we're wired most of the time but one of the biggest reasons we upgraded to it is because it has a faster processor now that might not mean a lot to some but when we start talking about some of the speed fusion and bonding technologies our processor on our max transit duo was getting pegged and it wasn't able to handle or give us the throughput that was available so that's our current main hub that guy acts as our wi-fi our main hub that we connect to additionally to help us extend our internal wi-fi here we have two of the i think they're called mini access points ap ones that basically allows us to have a physical access point here in the office and also up in our bedroom because we have an external antenna which i'm going to get to our wi-fi that is directly connected here is actually on our roof so the wi-fi inside the rv wasn't as good as it could be so we have those access points to handle that it also allows us to use our wi-fi in the truck because we have an access point in the bedroom that's close to where the truck and the hitch is we can actually use that wi-fi while we're driving down the road now in this device you know we've got four sim slots here currently we're using one in each because it has two modems we've got att and one and that's our grandfathered at t true unlimited plan and we've also got our verizon plan from easy mobile data that is also truly unlimited i mentioned we have this connected to an antenna our antenna didn't change from our last video so if you want to see how we installed that you can go check that out we've got an antenna mounted on our roof it's just a small little dome antenna and it's the pointing seven in one antenna seven just means it's got four memo cellular connections it's got two wi-fi and one gps now the reason it has the four memo is it's two per modem so you can see that i've got cellular one i've got two connections here and cellular two i've got two connections so we've got true memo on the roof all the time in addition to that antenna that's permanently mounted on our roof we have another antenna that's pole mounted and it's the akita parsec 4x4 memo so it like our permanently mounted antenna also has four cellular connections the big difference here is we can put that on our wii boost 25 foot pole and get it way up in the air and again getting your antenna as high as possible gets away from all the interference in here it gets at a better line of sight to the cellular tower and i read somewhere that every five feet gives you an extra 10 db or something i forget what it is but the higher the better when it comes to antennas we only use that when we need to when we get to a new location i do some speed checks i see what i'm getting on verizon and at t and t-mobile and if they're good i leave it alone i just use the roof antenna but if we're in say the mountains or somewhere where we're far away from the cellular antenna i will hook up our pole on the side crank it up put up our 4x4 memo we have a junction box on our roof with waterproof glands that we can connect our wires through and it goes right down into our tech cabinet here so all i do is i unscrew our mounted antenna connections and i attach the ones from the parsec antenna and it's just that simple now we're using an antenna that's way up in the air versus right on our roof and honestly that is the reason we don't use boosters anymore if i want to get an antenna way up in the air i'm not going to use a booster antenna that only has one channel i'm going to use our parsec antenna that has four channels also new in our tech cabinet up here is the pepwave max br1 pro 5g it took me like five times to get that out the big thing there is it's a cat 20 modem which it means it can do 5g it has the fifth generation technology there to actually use those newer bands like n71 or t-mobile but also a t and verizon wherever 5g is available that guy can connect to it that is currently holding our t-mobile plan that t-mobile plan is from mobile must have and that one is good for 800 gigabytes a month which is usually plenty when we mix it with all of our other ones by the way that pro 5g because it's the 5g it has actually four antenna connections unlike this which has to promote them that 4x4 parsec mimo antenna works really well for that however i've been having really good luck with just the blade antennas so that's the way it's connected right now but again diversity of plans diversity of equipment diversity of antennas all just means i have a lot more options when i get into those weird situations so you might be wondering how we have both of these new devices sitting up there it's really simple i have the max br1 connected to the wan port of this and then i have the wi-fi just disabled on it so it's basically a dedicated modem and it allows this guy to talk to it directly as well as use its two internal modems our new max transit pro is essentially directly connected to of course it's in two internal modems but also the external pro 5g that's connected to t-mobile and of course now we also have starlink so you might say how the heck do we get starlink in this mix well starlink has its own built-in wi-fi so all we do is we use the wi-fi as wan feature of this guy to connect to it so most of these pep wave routers they have their built-in modems of course they could talk directly to towers but they also have wi-fi as when which means you can use another wi-fi as a wan connection so you can use that to say connect to campground wi-fi if you want or to a star link if you want to do that of course starlink does have an ethernet option so it could be plugged directly into the wan port but our wan port is being used by our pro 5g so that's off limits because it's being used so we connect to that over wi-fi in fact right now where we're sitting we're actually connected to att and verizon the verizon connection isn't very good but we're also connected to the starlink so you might be asking okay starlink can i just use starlink by itself and the answer is yes and no if you look at the coverage map for starlink you'll see that the west coast is really really well covered in the east coast not so much it's not quite as good and all the testing we've done so far has been on the east coast so i can't really speak to how well it works out west but here it's been hit and miss number one you've got to have a really wide open sky for this thing to talk to as many satellites as it can if you're not familiar starlink is a low earth orbit solution so it's a little bit different than traditional or older i won't say traditional because it's not traditional anymore but older satellite technologies also the kind that you're going to see with dish and directv the old viostat those all use geosynchronous satellites and you'd usually be talking to one or a cluster of satellites that are in a single spot over the equator because that has to be that way for orbital dynamics but they point to one place in the sky and they stay there starlink is completely different it's got this phased array antenna there are satellites just whipping across the sky crisscrossing all over the place there's a really cool map online you can actually see them but the idea there is rather than connect to one it's going to connect to one for a little bit and then pick up another one and then pick up another one the trouble is if one of those satellites that you're talking to goes behind a tree or goes out of view or there's a gap in coverage where there's not currently a satellite right over your head then your internet's out now the ramifications of this kind of coverage where it may just go out at any second will affect you differently depending on what you're doing if you are just streaming tv most of your streaming services are designed with a buffer meaning they they what you're watching it's already downloaded the next few minutes of it so if your connection goes out it can start playing that buffer until the connection comes back and hopefully it comes back in time before you reach the end of your buffer but if you're doing things like zoom calls or you've got a vpn into your work situation where you're using a remote desktop or something along those lines it's out you're done you're disconnected if you're just gonna stream you might be okay with starlink it might be a bit annoying if you've got an outage for a minute or two but it's not the end of the world if you are working remotely however in my opinion starling is not quite ready for prime time maybe in a year or two as they get their full satellite coverage up there you know right now i don't know where they are as far as their percentage of how many satellites they want versus how many they plan to have but the coverage just isn't there right now for full-time work remotely in my opinion but like i mentioned if you're working remotely specifically if you have a job that you need to vpn into or something you really need to have a diverse array of connection options and a diverse array of data plans you know you might not go as crazy as we do with three cellular data plans and starlink and all that but the more you have the better chance it is that you're going to be able to connect everywhere you go if you're interested in a deeper dive into starlink by itself leave a comment down below it's not something that i planned on doing because we don't use it dedicated but i'm happy to give my opinions and go a little bit deeper into that if you're interested leave a comment down below so just a quick recap on all that and i'll start with this guy and it's not this one big but it looks like this so we've got our new max transit pro it has built in two modems one is cat seven one is cat 12 one is connected to at t right now and the other one is connected to verizon on our wan port we're connected directly to our pro 5g which is using t-mobile 5g and also connected over wi-fi is our starlink so this guy is currently connected to four different connections simultaneously which brings us to our next topic which is how do you use those what's what's the benefit why would you even do that and that's where we're going to get into some of our failover and bonding and things like that and i'm not going to go real real deep here because it's pretty advanced but you should be able to have a general idea of what the differences are when we're done and the first advantage is failover so these can be set up so that if you are talking say on your at t plan and also the att goes to crap it can automatically fail over to something else that can either be another sim card on the same modem which is the slowest form of failover because it has to reset the modem essentially reboot itself with the new sim card active the other form of failover is let's just say you have two active connections at the same time which is even better so say you've got a t and verizon or say you have a t and campground wi-fi or 18 starlink any two connections active constantly this thing can be set up so that as soon as that one fails it switches over automatically now both of those type of failover connections are going to disrupt your connection so if you're doing something like a vpn or a skype call or a zoom call it is going to go off but then come right back again depending on how fast it fails over but the advantage there is you could reconnect immediately and get back on your call or something along those lines another advantage of having multiple connections and it's not really a step up but it's load balancing so if you've got more than one connection active again any two connections will do be it cellular wi-fi is when or whatever it can actually do what's called load balancing so as you're using connections in the house and say an apple tv in the bedroom fires up and starts watching something it can go out one connection and you're browsing the web it can go out another connection and it basically just kind of round robins between the two of those it's or three or four or however many you have it's not super smart it just tries to pick the connection with the least congestion or the the next one in line again the way that works is because most of your connections for things like vpns and calls are going to be going up that one connection then staying connected if it has a hiccup it's going to disconnect so the next best thing up from that is bonding what the heck is it i'm going to try to explain it it's a little bit complex and i'll probably use a drawing here but think of it this way you've probably heard of virtual private networks or vpns people are using those a lot for security and what that is is you have a connection from your router or from your computer to a third party on the internet and all your traffic between you and them is encrypted and the idea there is that nobody can tell where your connection is coming from or what's going on your isp can't spy on you or whatever that's the standard use for a vpn another use is a tunnel a vpn tunnel and it can actually use multiple connections at once and that's what bonding is so bonding is essentially it's a vpn that uses more than one connection at a time and manages all those connections so the trick is you've got to have something on the other end something to vpn to that can understand that connection and peplink has done a really really good job on this with their product called speed diffusion i think it used to be called fusion cloud now it's called speed fusion connect but the idea here is i've got this guy that can talk to speed fusion and again this is not a technology that is specific to pep link there are lots of different bonding technologies you can build your own the thing i like about this is it's super super simple it's like three clicks and you're done and what it does is it'll take whatever active connections you have however many connections it can see and manage directly for us i mentioned just a minute ago we've got a t and verizon and t-mobile and starlink all together so we got four connections it can take all four of those and bind them together into a single virtual channel now don't worry about how it does this just know that inside it's almost like having four lines to the internet at the same time they're all bonded into one virtual connection and the cool thing there is it will actually send some of your data down multiple connections at the same time again depending on how you set it up i'm not going to go real deep into that unless you want me to we can maybe do a separate video on that but the idea here is i've got those four connections and they're all being used at the same time and this thing is managing sending that data down one or more of them all at once and if at t dies my connection is not over at t so say i've got a vpn going or a video call or something along those lines my connection is through the tunnel and the fact that att just died doesn't matter to that tunnel i mean it does it has to drop it and manage that connection but your data keeps going and this is the best solution for those who need to work from home uninterrupted who need to be on video calls and not have it dropping out every few minutes the the bonding the speed fusion thing is really really cool we've been using it now for two years yeah since the last video we use it pretty much all the time and again you want to be a little bit smart about it because the connection is not free you do have to pay peplink for the amount of data that you pub through there so you'll want to turn it on and turn it off for certain applications you don't want to do all your video streaming over this because video streaming is pretty resilient and kind of heals itself like i mentioned with startling dropping out it has a buffer it'll try to keep up so you don't want to use that data for that and the neat thing too is the speedfusion cloud lets you actually set rules you can say hey for zoom calls use the tunnel for everything else don't so it really lets you customize it and decide how you want to use that connection another good use case for this is our live streams if you've watched our live streams you might see that they might go in and out as far as the video quality it might change but they never disconnect that's because whenever we do our live streams we're always doing it over a speed fusion connection it's always bonded with as many connections as we can get in there the type of connection does matter you don't want to have three super fast connections and one really really slow connection because that can bog the whole thing down so we do usually do some testing and figure out what combination is going to work best but having bonded connections having the speed fusion has allowed us to have our live streams go flawlessly so that's our very complex setup i know it's a little bit crazy having all these things all connected together but that's just how i roll i love dealing with this tech but i realize that's not for everybody if you've got to work from home when you need to vpn into work and you need to do zoom calls one of these guys by itself with a roof antenna and a couple of data plans is the way to go that alone will allow you to use things like speed fusion for your calls and not drop calls and things along those lines it's a really good way to go so what's next for us because you know me i already have my eye on some new tech coming out pepwave has a new mbx router that's coming out that's going to be dual modem much like this is but both of the modems are going to be 5g capable it also has a lot more weight and lan ports so what that's going to allow me to do is connect to multiple 5g connections while also being hardwired to starlink and whatever else i want to connect to so that's going to be really cool and that'll probably be another year before we have that out that's not even out yet i think the device comes out in like five months or something i know some of this was super complicated and if it went way way over your head go join the mobile internet resource center watch their course then come back and watch this i guarantee you'll understand a lot more of it if you have any questions put them down below we'll see you next time you
2022-07-19