Tech Time

At the Pandion RV resort in Gulf Shores, AL, where alligators are only steps from your RV door, the Wifi is great! One of the problems we (and most full time RVers) experience is lack of internet access. If you depend on RV parks for free Wifi you’ll be gravely disappointed.  Although most RV parks advertise, “Free Wifi included!”,  the first thing they tell you when you check in is, “Yes, we have free wifi, but you can’t do anything with it.  Oh, you can check email, but if we catch you streaming music or Youtube or movies we’ll block your IP completely. Enjoy 🙂 ”  That’s the case with probably 80-90% of the parks where we’ve stayed, if they even claim to have Wifi at all.

Therefore, we depend on our cell phones and one HotSpot to fill in the gaps.  Even though we have a Verzion Unlimited plan that we pay too much for it’s still not enough data.  In fact, “Unlimited” really just means, “not quite as limited as the other plans”.  Our plan gives us 15Gig per month of highspeed data (meaning 4G speeds).  After the phone or JetPack reaches 15G you get throttled back to 2G speeds which is about as good as most RV parks free Wifi (not very).

I’ve asked Verizon in the last few months for better options.  The only option until now has been to pay an extra $30 per 5Gig above the 15Gig limit for each line. That’s too much.  I use a Pepwave Max BR-1 router in the RV ( it replaces the JetPack by using its sim card) and it performs much better than the JetPack (because of better antennas and internal radios).  So when we connect our laptops and cellphones to the Pepwave for wifi, it just wipes out the allotted 15Gig in a couple of days.

But wait!  A new option from Verizon just arrived.  A new pre-paid plan for JetPacks only with truly, for real, no kidding, unlimited data!
Is it really true?  Well I just signed up for it so we’re going to find out.  We can easily use 50 to 100Gig per month if we don’t have good wifi available, so 15Gig (or even 45Gig of all 3 lines combined) is not very much when we are wifi deprived.  I’ll do an update if Verizon throttles me or if the plan changes.  But this appears to be a pretty good deal for us.

I found out about this new plan from Technomadia.  They run a little website that keeps up to date with all the latest in mobile phone and data technology (routers, cell phone plans, etc.) especially for the full-time RVer or frequent traveler.  They do a lot of their own testing of systems, too.  They have a lot of very good info on their site, give it a look.

The new Verizon plan has to be pre-paid.  It’s $70 a month (if you setup auto-pay you can knock off $5/mo).  I had to cancel my post-paid Jetpack plan (saving $20/mo) and reactivate my Jetpack/sim on then new pre-paid plan.  It just took the dude on the phone a few minutes and we’re up and running.

Here’s the direct link to the article from Technomadia’s Mobile Internet Resource Center about the new plan.

We found out in Maine that the radio and antennas on the Pepwave are far superior to the JetPack or our cellphones.  Back in the Maine woods cell strength was poor, our phones were hit and miss, but while we still had highspeed data on the Pepwave we could surf the web just fine, even stream Hulu.  Once we hit the 15G limit, forget about it!

I hope someone else finds this useful like I did.