Internet connections - was Toads

[Don Bradner]

I hope the moderators here don't mind that we are discussing internet
connections in a Bird forum; if so, please say so and there are lots of places
specific to the discussion.

Having said that, it is somewhat of a natural in most online RV forums. We are
all internet users or we wouldn't be here, and we travel.

My specialty is satellite. I think I can say that I probably am more immersed in
the topic than anyone else who does not make money from selling or installing
the dishes. I own/run DatastormUsers.com, and with the death of the group
founder I'm now a moderator of the Yahoo RVInternetBySatellite group; I'm also
an MVM in the BroadbandReports satellite forums.

I think there are a significant number of the readers here with satellite, both
automatic and manual. I recognize a lot of the names of posters. At Quartzsite,
with 24 Birds in attendance, there were 3 Datastorms and at least one other was
a tripoder who did not bother to deploy his dish.

In fact this year at Quartzsite was the first year that it did not feel
"special" to have an internet dish. They were everywhere you looked!

So, you might expect I would say that everyone who wants internet on the road
should get a dish, but I'm not going to say that. Frankly I think a
one-size-fits-all approach is silly, but the arguments do rage on - "Get EVDO
and that's all you need", "You won't get on in a lot of places without
satellite", "You don't need either with the number of parks that have WiFi these
days." All of those are correct for the people saying them, but not necessarily
for those they are talking to.

While the speeds of EVDO and satellite are similar, the experience is not.
Satellite involves such immense latency that an EVDO user will run rings around
a dish user when doing almost anything on the net other than straight file
movement. If EVDO was everywhere the arguments would all be moot. Since a lot of
travelers tend to do the interstate thing and move from metropolis to metropolis
there is absolutely no reason why EVDO, supplemented with occasional WiFi, won't
work for them.

For those that don't mind some days without any connection, and just end-of-day
connections otherwise, park WiFi can be the solution, particularly with
planning.

Both, but particularly EVDO, can work quite well for those who work on the road
so long as they are able to plan when/where they need to be online. That
includes tax preparers, programmers, and a wide variety of other jobs that can
telecommute.

Satellite comes into its own in places like North-Eastern Montana, Death Valley,
and Big Bend. If you have to be accessible and you don't have satellite you just
don't go there. Note I said if you have to be accessible, which is my
circumstance. My internet use is mixed between "must be on" and "want to be on."
The latter is high enough that I would probably have satellite anyway, and I
suspect that more than half of satellite internet users fall in the "want to be
on, willing to pay for it" category.

I am, however, leaning towards adding EVDO to the mix. I like the combo of an
MB6800 router and a USB Air Card...

Can't have too many internet connections, can't have too much speed!



Don Bradner
90 PT40 "Blue Thunder"
Eureka, CA