Marine WIFI ????

[BillinPA]

Long story, long version.
My marina is on the Bohemia River, MD and they supply spotty WiFi at best. To top that off there is a huge 46’ cruiser between me and the tower.
My neighbor has a booster that works great for him, so I bought the better one. If he’s not in the slip, it’s hit or miss. If he is, it’s miss.
To top that off I have T Mobile and was told last year that they were upgrading my tower to 5G. So I had no phone reception. I picked up a T mobile hotspot which is still hit or miss.

what can I do to get better WiFi?

bill.

 

[bajturner]

Hey Bill. I know a few, including myself, have used devices like what is offered from Peplink with external antennas with some pretty decent results.

There is a good discussion here: http://clubsearay.com/index.php?threads/ubiquity-bullet-m2-vs-peplink-max-br1-mini-wan-wifi.101605/.

 

[Irie308]

In the past several years I’ve only found great consistent WiFi at one marina. This is probably helped by the repeater being at my slip. My other marina is like you said, hit or miss, mostly miss. I would get exactly what your neighbor is using if it works for him. Just because there is a better unit doesn’t mean it fits this application. I too have a booster and still hit or miss. Also note when it comes to fiberglass and WiFi in boats 2.4 ghz works better than 5ghz even though 5 is faster.

 

[bobeast]

I went with a PepLink hotspot. If you do that and mount some high quality diversity antennas up high, you may get out of your neighbor's shadow.

 

[importmonkey]

I heard good things about Nomad Internet from RV folks. I may go this route if my travel router doesn't pan out.

 

[AllanS]

If you have good cellular service, buy a Wi-Fi hotspot. I have the MoFi 4500, but there many similar devices, which use the cellular signal to create a WiFi hotspot (without using your phone as a hotspot). Mine works great. Gives me about 30 Mb of download speed with just 2 bars of cellular signal.

 

[quality time]

Move to Bobay! We have great wifi at the marina.

 

[Blueone]

Without line of sight to wifi you are always going to be spotty

 

[bbwhitejr]

If you have good cellular service, buy a Wi-Fi hotspot. I have the MoFi 4500, but there many similar devices, which use the cellular signal to create a WiFi hotspot (without using your phone as a hotspot). Mine works great. Gives me about 30 Mb of download speed with just 2 bars of cellular signal.

The only issue I have with these hotspots is after a certain number of gigs, they slow down....

Bennett

 

[Skybolt]

The only issue I have with these hotspots is after a certain number of gigs, they slow down....

Bennett

Depending on the plan, but my Cell plan (boat) is 50gb a month of 4/5gig speeds then it slows downs to unusable.

 

[bajturner]

I have two SIM cards in my Peplink, one with 100G and one with 50G, with appropriate rules to draw on them accordingly. Rules are also set up such that kids' devices can only use the cellular data at 10%, with the other 90% depending on available marina WiFi.

When we left the dock and were on cellular only the kids' devices had throttles. It auto-connects to any stored WiFi points when they are in range.

From June to September I worked full-time from the boat and never had a problem with running out of data.

A bit complicated to set up, and I am still learning, but worked well.

 

[bbwhitejr]

Depending on the plan, but my Cell plan (boat) is 50gb a month of 4/5gig speeds then it slows downs to unusable.

I wonder how many gigs a 3.5 hour football game consumes?

Bennett

 

[bajturner]

I wonder how many gigs a 3.5 hour football game consumes?

Bennett

Depends on the resolution. You can get away with about 1Gig per hour, I think.

 

[Irie308]

We use nomad internet for mobile hotspotting over the summer. No throttling or data caps. Tried them out last season. My kids did their best to see how many gigs of data they could chew through. At one point we averaged about 40gigs per week.

https://nomadinternet.com/?gclid=Cj...6pQfQ9dE_7EfEV_8SYnSrJRAEDW4k4HBoC1qsQAvD_BwE

 

[bajturner]

We use nomad internet for mobile hotspotting over the summer. No throttling or data caps. Tried them out last season. My kids did their best to see how many gigs of data they could chew through. At one point we averaged about 40gigs per week.

https://nomadinternet.com/?gclid=Cj...6pQfQ9dE_7EfEV_8SYnSrJRAEDW4k4HBoC1qsQAvD_BwE

Whose cell network do they wholesale from?

 

[Skybolt]

I wonder how many gigs a 3.5 hour football game consumes?

Bennett

It should be something like the following:

SD quality (480p video) – 0.7GB (700MB) per hour
HD quality (between 720p and 2K) – 0.9GB (720p), 1.5GB (1080p) and 3GB (2K) per hour
4K Ultra HD quality – 7.2GB per hour

That's for video sources like YouTubeTv/NetFlix/Amazon etc. That said I have been able to get through a month of weekends (Fri night,sat. and sun) with the 50GB limit. I only had one issue this past summer in July when T-Mo changed somethings and couldn't stream anything for almost two weeks. But baring that, I usually leave some sports event on all of the time and stream music. Was trying to test and stress this out before I dumped DTV this past fall. I did go all season without using DTV, win win in my book.

 

[Irie308]

Whose cell network do they wholesale from?

Based on the the plan you choose. They base it on color, so their pink plan is T-mobile, red plan is Verizon. However the data is truly unlimited.

 

[bajturner]

Based on the the plan you choose. They base it on color, so their pink plan is T-mobile, red plan is Verizon. However the data is truly unlimited.

Cool that it's unlimited. Doesn't look like Nomad is available in Canada at this point. Where I boat, I do have strong signal from cell towers on the US side though!

SIM cards should work in the Peplink routers, I would think.

 

[bbwhitejr]

It should be something like the following:

SD quality (480p video) – 0.7GB (700MB) per hour
HD quality (between 720p and 2K) – 0.9GB (720p), 1.5GB (1080p) and 3GB (2K) per hour
4K Ultra HD quality – 7.2GB per hour

That's for video sources like YouTubeTv/NetFlix/Amazon etc. That said I have been able to get through a month of weekends (Fri night,sat. and sun) with the 50GB limit. I only had one issue this past summer in July when T-Mo changed somethings and couldn't stream anything for almost two weeks. But baring that, I usually leave some sports event on all of the time and stream music. Was trying to test and stress this out before I dumped DTV this past fall. I did go all season without using DTV, win win in my book.

The satellite is nice, but the price....thanks for the education...

Bennett

 

[Skybolt]

The satellite is nice, but the price....thanks for the education...

Bennett

Mine (DTV) was only SD and with devices like FireTv you can get HD and UHD 4K viewing for $39 piece of hardware and watch what ever you can stream, except some sports. No brainer if you ask me.