Staying Connected On the Road: 3G Internet
November 6th, 2009
Jessica and I love the road, but a necessary evil of ours is that we like to stay connected to the internet. The internet has made it easy to get tips on new camping places and to keep in touch with friends and family. Part of our income comes from freelance advertising work and the internet is our principle means of communicating with clients, delivering proofs, and uploading artwork.
Now there are many different ways to stay connected out there. On the cheapest end of the spectrum is to hunt around for wifi hotspots. These are becoming more and more easy to find. The best places are coffee shops, cafes, and some fast food joints like McDonald's. This is great as long you have a wifi enabled laptop and don't mind working in what can be sometimes noisy environments. Finding power for your laptop can be an issue as well.
A lot of campgrounds offer free wifi. But this can be flakey sometimes.
Some campgrounds say that they have it, but when you get there the signal is low, drops out, and might be out all together. Reading reviews of the campgrounds is about the only way to see if it works well without biting the bullet and hoping that it works fine.
Another option is that you could have your own internet satellite dish setup on your rig. You could use a dish that you set up yourself each time you stop, with a company like WildBlue that can cost $50 to $80 a month. Or you could go with a more permanent automated satellite finder dish that could cost thousands for the hardware alone.
We found that the best solution for us was to try the world of 3G internet. 3G basically works off your cell phone service where you can hook directly to your phone or use an adapter that plugs into your computer. When shopping around, make sure you read all the fine print or you'll be surprised when that first bill arrives.
Most all phone companies have their own solution for 3G and some have limits. Verizon caps off how much data that you can transfer a month. If you watch a few movies online, you'll find yourself quickly passing over that threshold and then you'll be paying an insane amount of overage fees. We ended up going with Alltel just for the sake that they had an unlimited data plan paying around $70 a month.
With pretty much all of these options you shouldn't expect blazing speeds, not right now at least. A house internet setup with a local cable company can get anywhere from 6mbps to 50mbps.
Most of these on the road options won't get over 3mbps, while it isn't the fastest speed, it's still adequate enough to work off of. What we love about it is the ability to work while driving, as long as you're in a decent coverage area you can answer emails while cruising down the interstate (as long as you're the passenger of course).
But we still had a dilemma, we had multiple computers and with only one adapter, we needed a 'cradlepoint'. Cradlepoint has a couple different options, but the one we picked works just like home routers. It spreads your 3G service so laptop's with wifi and other wifi enabled devices can pick up the signal. This option really worked great for us because now we both can be on and have the ability to connect our Xbox to stream movies off of. You can avoid the cradlepoint and just hook the adapter to one computer and enable internet sharing, but we found that it was buggy and would constantly drop the connection.
As you can see, there are many options out there for staying connected to the internet while on the road. Just make sure to do your research, read reviews of products, and talk to others before choose which way is best for you and you'll be surfing in no time. What to join in the discussion? Talk about it below or in the forum.
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