We may be traveling full-time right now, but I’m definitely not on vacation. Our “financial plan” for this trip included two major parts: 1) Saving a ton beforehand so we’d have an emergency fund that gave us enough cushion to feel comfortable with quitting our jobs, and 2) Me freelancing while we’re traveling to earn the money we’d live off day-to-day. I’m very fortunate to work in an industry that only really requires a laptop and reliable internet. It’s very friendly to digital nomads. The problem, though, is that we never really know how reliable our internet will be when we move to a new place.
RV campgrounds notoriously have free but useless WiFi—the bandwidth isn’t nearly enough for how many people are lying in their beds trying to stream Netflix, so everyone gets a measly signal that’s pretty much only enough to shoot off an email every now and then. I knew I’d need enough WiFi to not only receive and send emails, but to also use Google office suite freely, surf the web quickly to do research and dig for sources, sometimes watch videos (like if I’m working on a workout and need to watch a recording of a move for reference), and access the backend of a website I contribute to frequently. Those may sound like simple tasks, but it’s amazing how a crappy WiFi signal can impact productivity. If it takes 3 minutes to load each webpage (instead of a few seconds), the time it takes me to research a topic I’m reporting on multiplies exponentially.
This is all sort of besides the point anyway because we’re spending the majority of our time camping in dispersed camping areas, aka, free camping spots that have no water, sewage hook-ups, electric, or WiFi.
Which brings me to my WiFi setup. It’s not perfect, and I’m sure we’ll run into issues with it in certain places and have to figure out some workarounds. But for now, it’s been pretty reliable, and there has only been one day where I’ve been totally SOL and had to just accept that I wouldn’t be working until we moved to a new location (luckily, it was a Friday so I was able to finish my assignments over the weekend and still meet my deadlines). Here’s what I use:
- Verizon Jetpack
- Unlimited data on my phone
- WeBoost signal booster
Sorry if you thought that list would be more exciting, but that’s it. The Jetpack, which is a small device that acts as a personal hotspot, is “unlimited,” which I learned to Verizon means you get 15 GB of high-speed service, and then your speed drops drastically after those initial 15 gigs. The Verizon employee who sold me the hotspot device failed to tell me that, even after I asked him approximately six times to confirm that it was “truly unlimited” because I would be relying on this to make a living. Word on the street (in RV Facebook groups) is that Verizon no longer offers a truly unlimited Jetpack, and so you’ll get throttled (when the provider limits your speed drastically after a certain amount of usage) eventually. But luckily, the lower speeds are sufficient for the majority of my work—we’re mostly annoyed because it means we can’t use the Jetpack for Hulu since we have to save the high speed data for actual work.
The data on my phone is helpful because I can tether to my computer. That also gets throttled, but it’s another source of data that typically is sufficient to do my work, minus big downloads or uploads. And sometimes, even though both my phone and hotspot are Verizon and so should have identical signals when they’re in the same location, I’ve found that my phone sometimes works better. My assumption is that the iPhone hardware is just better than the $150 Jetpack device (not verified, don’t quote me on that) and so it’s able to hold a signal better.
In total, I pay about $100 a month for both my phone and the Jetpack—I got a promotional offer and am only paying $10 per month for the Jetpack, which feels like a steal…and makes me a little less bitter about the throttling thing.
The WeBoost device we have is the WeBoost Drive 4G-X RV (470410) Cell Phone Signal Booster for RV or Motorhome ($500). It’s pricey and sort of a pain to set up and take down each time we use it (I’ll eventually write about how Joe hooked it up and hardwired it to our battery so we can use it off-the-grid, for anyone who cares) but we figured it would be worth the investment if it allowed me to keep working—and keep making money—in most locations we visited. So far, we haven’t had to use it much, but when we have, it’s taken us from 1-2 bars of service to 4. And that makes a huge difference in terms of processing speeds.
There are a few RV and digital nomad Facebook groups you can join to hear about how other full-time travelers get reliable internet, but this is what’s worked for us so far. And if anything changes, I’ll make sure to update this post and share!
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