Boat Internet - 2022 Edition

 

We're barreling towards the start of the 2022 season (officially April 15 - possibly a week or two earlier depending on weather, etc.).  This time of the year gets me to thinking about the possibility of working from the boat, but also dreaming of lounging in the salon watching a video in a gentle summer rain while at anchor.  For that, I need some means of internet access... with an HDTV on board, it needs to be a fairly fast and robust solution.

I have two main choices - WiFi and Cellular.  (I'm ignoring satellite for now as still too expensive.)

Many marinas offer WiFi these days and we've found (even at our home marina, Osprey Point) that WiFi can be a crap shoot.  The marina might offer great WiFi but locate transient boaters too far away to get good signals.  The marina WiFi can also work well until everyone's grandchildren come for the weekend adding a few thousand (it seems) devices and overloading the response.

That leaves a cellular solution.  Last year we carried a Verizon 4G hotspot from a few years ago, but towards the end of the season that device (at least 5 years old) started acting erratically.  As I researched possible replacements over the winter, I realized we are in a transition for cellular service with all the major players beginning to roll out aspects of 5G.

A quick primer (yes, I'm ignoring all the technical stuff)... original cell phones (1G/2G) were OK at phone calls and data use was limited relative to today.  3G came out and slowly morphed to 4G and LTE which handles data reasonably well.  Now we have 5G.  True 5G has limited ability to penetrate obstacles but is blazing fast.  That is limited mostly to inner cities right now.  There's a new "ultra wide band" of 5G which is not as fast as the inner city 5G, but much faster than the 4G/LTE.

One of the best resources has been the Mobil Internet Resource Center which is sort of a "consumer reports" on internet for boaters and RVers.  Distilling an awful lot of content, there are a wide range of solutions out there.  Some broad categories are using our phone or tablet as a hotspot, separate hotspots from the carriers, and cellular modems (some of which are inexpensive but can range to really comprehensive ones supporting multiple carriers and redundant switching).

The resource center has a good guide explaining these options.

What did I end up choosing?  

First, a few assumptions.  I expect that all of our boating will be in the Chesapeake Bay at least this year and possibly the next.  Second, while I have been essentially 100% working from home and boat during the pandemic, my company is not really committing to that mode and I expect there will be a call-back to the office with just a couple of months notice at any moment.  Third, technology will improve greatly this year as more companies respond to the ultra wide band.

For those reasons, I decided not to invest in the super redundant automatic switching (and super expensive) solution like the Max Transit Pro (over $1K).  

I like the idea of redundancy, but realize I have that through the devices I already own (an AT&T cell phone and a Verizon tablet).  To this I added a modest cellular modem (picture at the top) from TravelData which has a truly unlimited (no throttling) HD plan on the T-Mobil network.

It's based on the GL-iNet Spitz router, meaning it is a 4G/LTE solution.  That might sound weird but I didn't want to spend a lot of money, opting for truly unlimited and unthrottled 4G/LTE at a nice price point of around $250.  We will look into 5G once that technology settles down.

AT&T coverage

T-Mobil coverage

Verizon coverage

In terms of coverage, T-mobil is generally accepted as having the best build-out of their wide band coverage, Verizon seems slower.  AT&T also has good coverage.  The darker colors mean better high speed 5G wide band coverage.  You can clearly see that Verizon has quite a few holes along the Eastern Shore especially in key places like near our marina and St. Michaels, but 4G essentially covers the bay.

The main plan is we'll use the T-Mobil cellular modem first, backed up by the AT&T iPhone and Verizon iPad.  For now I'll manually switch among them, since once they're all set up it is relatively simple.  And yes, I'm still dreaming of that fully-remote job where I can sail south and work from the boat in Key West (or maybe even Sarasota) like a some of my dock-mates.  When that becomes a reality I'll invest in the more expensive gear.

The modem arrived and we went down to Rock Hall to test it (we had 3 days to return it).  After connecting it up we were able to stream Netflix nicely and without a video playing we would have two devices with usable (occasional buffering) connections.  Of course once getting Vicky down to Rock Hall, we had to head over to Kent Island for some crabs.

Finally, back at home, I did speed tests on all three.  The TravelData showed 38/26 Mbps (up/down), the Verizon 50/5 Mbps and my cell phone showed over 100 up (no down listed).  Those will get me started.

Addendum:  

I finally called and found out the hotspot data I have available on the three plans.  The TravelData/T-Mobil solution is unlimited at 4G speeds (speed set to their "HD" speed - enough to stream for our HDTV on Seas The Day.

My Verizon iPad gets 30GB of hotspot data (can access 5G, but that doesn't cover our current area in Rock Hall).

My AT&T iPhone has 9 GB of hotspot data (that can access 5G wideband they have in our region).