The vanlife guide to staying (dis)connected

Modern vanlife is in an interesting paradox. We want to roam and be disconnected from city life while remaining connected to our digital lives. I’ve tried tons of different hardware from signal boosters, fancy antennas, hotspots, wifi/bluetooth/usb tethering across different platforms: iOS, Android, Windows, Mac across different cell providers: T-Mobile, Verizon etc and here’s what I’ve learned:

1. Data CAN be expensive
2. Location matters
3. Complexity matters
4. Wire suck, but…

Data CAN be expensive

My first approach to power Wifi in the van was to use a hotspot. Of course I didn’t go with the simple hotspot device, I went for the Air Force One of hotspots, the CradlePoint:

Instead of having tiny little antennas built in, this beast allows you to use any antennae you want, “skies” the limit:

A van with serious antennae game (left). Clifford with some magnetic antennas (right).

Of course you then need to run the antennae cables into the van, plug them into the device, find a place to mount/bolt the device, run power lines to it and potentially run an ethernet cable from it to your laptop (more on that later).
I find all this hardware a little overkill so I ended up going back to a regular Verizon hotspot device, it was easier to use/charge/store etc.
But both of these hotspot solution require one key thing: a data-only plan from a cell provide. And these plans SUCK!

(Left to right) Verizon, AT&T, TMobile.

These prices don’t look “so” bad BUT then they charge you $20 to use the hotspot device as “line” fee…. (T-Mobile doesn’t do this actually, which makes their plans $25/month cheaper than VZW or AT&T.

Notice those lovely “monthly access charges” because you can pay them for data AND then you have to pay for access to the data you just “bought”…

But the title of this section is “Data CAN be expensive”, implying that there is a cheaper way. JUST GET A PHONE LINE! T-Mobile came in a disrupted the cell market a couple years ago offering cheap unlimited plans forcing Verizon and AT&T to compete and now they all offer pretty decent unlimited plans.

I’ve been using Verizon’s unlimited plan for a couple months now and have had service on just about every mountain top, valley floor, desert oasis, & snowy gorge I’ve travelled to. NOTE: Unlimited Mobile Hotspot! (the asterisk is that they slow you down to 3G speeds after 15GB) which is fine! 3G is still totally fast enough for chatting, googling, instagramming, swiping right, pushing code, googling, email etc.

Location Matters

I’ve found that the hardware solution of massive antennas can easily be made irrelevant by simply moving your van until you have better reception. Your house moves! Take advantage of that. Instead of parking a mile further into the mountains, try parking within line-of-sight of a spot with cell signal and voila, you can normally get signal there. You could spend a ton of 💰trying to find ways of pulling tiny amounts of cell signal out of the air but I’ve found it much easier to move around a little. It’s also worth doing a little research and trying to find places with large enough towns to have a cell tower and few geological barriers (mountains) to block that signal and you can usually get solid signal on your phone.

Complexity Matters

My favorite part of using a cell phone to tether a laptop is how simple it is. If you already have a cell-line with a non-Verizon provider and you don’t want to change numbers or port your number over (maybe you’re on a family plan or have a good legacy plan), you can pickup an older smartphone for about as much as you can get a hotspot device for and then boom, you not only have a fully capable hotspot device but you also have a backup phone full of apps & goodies galore!

Wires suck, but…

Wires can be a necessary evil. In particular I’m talking about plugging your cellphone into your laptop via a USB cable and running the internet connection over the wire, instead of wirelessly tethering your laptop to your phone (where your phone acts as a repeater). Without getting radio frequencies engineering world, suffice to say that wireless signals are inherently slower than wired signals, in fact they’re about 2x slower if not more. If you wirelessly tether a laptop to a cell phone, your laptop makes a request, your phone then receives that request and submits that request again to the internet. Your phone waits for a reply, then send that reply to your laptop. Versus a wired approach, your laptop request goes straight out to the internet via the phone and then comes back to your laptop through your phone.

A quick note: because wireless tethering essentially cuts your bandwidth in half, this can be extremely important when you’re on the edge of a coverage area! If you’re in a city and you have 20mbps connection, go ahead and wirelessly tether all day long because if you’re just doing normal internet surfing, you probably only need 1–3mbps connection. But if you’re out in the sticks and you’ve only got 1–2 bars of intermittent signal, you need every bit of bandwidth you can get!

My setup:

1. iPhone SE on T-Mobile (Unlimited family plan)
2. iPhone 7+ on Verizon (BeyondUnlimited Plan)
3. C̶r̶a̶d̶l̶e̶P̶o̶i̶n̶t̶ ̶I̶B̶R̶6̶0̶0̶
4. V̶e̶r̶i̶z̶o̶n̶ ̶M̶i̶F̶i̶ ̶J̶e̶t̶p̶a̶c̶k̶
5. Two 2015 MacBook Pros (13 & 15")

Stayed tuned for a couple upcoming articles: Staying Connected Abroad and Tips & Tricks for optimizing your MacBook for VanLife

Looking forward to hearing your feedback, what does & doesn’t work for you!

— Sante Kotturi