Local WiFi network for Roku and Plex server?

[wiredgeorge]

Not much application to an RV except if you don't move but we are out in the boonies with little access to high speed internet except for Hughesnet. It worked ok but was really expensive and speeds went into the dumpster during peak usage hours. You could stream video in non peak but in peak hours, there was some buffering. They claim 25 mbits/sec. Hughesnet was cheaper than using an AT&T hotspot by about $50 a month but still very expensive for the 50 gigs of data allowance per month. We had 35 gigs of data with AT&T.

Recently, AT&T has rolled out a technology called FIXED WIRELESS INTERNET. It is line of sight high speed internet coming from transmitters they stick up on their cell towers and is on different frequencies than cell service, as I understand it but is still fairly line of sight. The good news is that quite a few towers are getting this service for rural customers. It requires a dish/radio on your wall or roof that can see a transmit tower signal and they give you a router. This service costs $70 a month ($60 first year) and you get 150 gigs of data. My download speeds are consistent at about 30 mbits/sec and upload about 10 mbits/sec. Only negative is that their firmware keeps dropping the DHCP lease and picking up a new one far more quickly than any other service I have had and I use C-Panel to control my website and do email and this drives these services nuts. I had to make changes to the server settings to accommodate AT&T as they would not allow me to purchase fixed IP addresses. The service works great otherwise and streaming Netflix is now super at any time of the day or night. I am paying the full $70 for my first year as this allows me to subscribe without a contract as I am fully aware that AT&T customer support can be beyond painful if you want to cancel service for some reason.

[sourdough]

Originally Posted by xrated

Performance update.... I went back to work yesterday after a nice 4 day Thanksgiving Holiday weekend and took the jetpack 8800L with me, battery charged and ready to go. First order of business was to tether my tablet to the Jetpack and run a speed test. So here we go......35-36 Meg down and around 15-16 Meg up. During the course of the day, I ran the speedtest app several more times and got basically the same results everytime. If I remember correctly, the slowest upload speed was 31 Meg and the slowest download speed was 13 Meg. I had been worried all weekend long about the new Jetpack, as the signal at my house is not very good and I was not seeing very good numbers coming from the Jetpack tether. Once I go to a place that had a good signal from Verizon though, it was giving the numbers that it should have been doing. So far, so good and I'm pretty happy with my decision to get it. As a note, I have the Jetpack 8800L on a Prepaid Unlimited plan with no hard data caps in place.

After you have used this a while hopefully you can provide another update. As we were preparing for this trip I was looking for a solution for all the places that we hit where wifi is either poor or non existent. One of the top considerations was to use my cell service as a hot spot. I contacted Verizon (my cell carrier) about an unlimited plan, not for the cell but with a JetPack. After explaining what we do; when traveling, or any other time actually, we only watch Netflix so our use would be watching Netflix from the hotspot each day. When I explained this to the Verizon rep. he said one JetPack would not work because at 15gb the speed would be throttled back and Netflix would not stream. The solution? Buy/lease 5 (FIVE) JetPacks and pay the monthly fee for unlimited data on each!! I told him he obviously had to understand that wasn't a viable solution...which he did. I called back in to see if he was full of it and another person told me the same thing. Are we talking about the same service??

[dcount]

We pay $50 a month for two lines with unlimited everything with Cricket. Cricket utilizes the ATT network, so obviously would depend on the signal in the area you are camping. We watch mostly Netflix through our Roku, works great. Even when we are just getting 1 or 2 bars it still works well. The catch is with Cricket, after about 23 gigs, you get throttled back, but we can watch a lot until that time. Just another option! Good Luck!