How We Stay Connected To The Internet While On The Road

Just because we camp often does not mean we are fully roughing it. The kids have tablets with them. We have a couple laptops with us to run our blog and check emails. We have TVs in the camper that need to stream our Rokus. Not that it’s all we do in the camper, but we do use electronics for various reasons. It did not take long to realize that these items would not run off our cell phone hot spots alone. In many areas of Vermont and New Hampshire that we have visited we didn’t have cell phone service at all, so hotspots didn’t work there at all either. When you are working remotely you need internet. When it’s a rainy day and you are stuck in the camper and have already played 300 games of UNO that day, you need the internet to watch a movie. We’ve come to a day and age where it is a necessity.

After seeing several full-time RVers post about internet service, we decided to give TravelFi a try. Amazon has a great deal on it here that you can get with Prime 2-day shipping. You can buy the router from them, but you will need to activate the service through TravelFi. They offer several different data plans that are fully customizable based on how much service you need. For now, we have purchased one of the smaller plans but will be upgrading to more GB next month when we hit the road full-time. It is worth it to us to have internet available on all our devices at all times. The way we used to have to finagle hotspots on our phones and rotate which one was on was ridiculous!

This is the smallest router that they have advertised. We opted for this one and it has been working great so far for our devices, but again, as we hit the road full-time we will play it by ear and see if we need to upgrade to a different one to power more devices. I’d say we probably have 3 to 5 devices powering through this device at a time now and it is fully functional to us.

The router comes in a little carrying case with a carabiner on it. I leave it attached to the strap of my laptop bag. I’ve seen videos of other users mounting this router to the camper wall so it is always in one spot and near an outlet to charge. I prefer not to stick too many things to the walls and want to have this easily able to come with us in the truck or to the beach or wherever we may be working that day. I leave it in the case and just take it out next to the laptop when we need it.

So far we’ve been camping mostly in Vermont and New Hampshire. I’ll tell you cell service is spotty no matter where you are in these two states. You may have full service right now but in two minutes you have nothing. I was wondering how this router would work. It’s been nothing short of amazing. For our week-long trip in Warren, NH our cells had about zero service. We could text, but could barely open Facebook. This little router lets us stream movies, and more than one at a time. It kept up with downloading photos, video chats, and everything else we needed. That right there proved that this was a great product.

This past weekend we were in northern Vermont again finding ourselves with very scarce cell service. This router lets us do some remote work and stream movies. We will provide more updates on the service as we travel, but so far this service has been great.

As mentioned above, we did not buy the unlimited plan as of yet but intend to when we hit the road full-time. For now, I simply log in to the TravelFi website and can monitor how many gigs I have left to use in the billing period. While I do look forward to having it unlimited soon, for now, it has been super simple to keep tabs on our usage. I’d definitely recommend this company and this product to anyone looking to keep their internet active while on the road, without going crazy on their cell phone data plan. Get yours today: Journey1 LTE Wi-Fi Hotspot, RV Internet, Multiple Networks, Pay As You Go, No Contracts.