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What satellite service or equipment will help for strong Internet demands working in RV??
Forgive my ignorance about a lot of this, I'm trying to do research for a friend who desperately needs to work on the road in her Class A motorhome.
She needs a lot of bandwidth (I think they call it), a very strong dependable Internet signal.
Her work entails uploading large audio - and video - files.
She's a TV producer.
She's been working from home .....and now is in a situation where she really needs to travel and work from her RV
They have paid for a satellite service -- and just took their first "test" road trip to rural CT, and the signal was not strong enough for the work demands.
The next trip is planned for Austin,TX....... then Arizona (near the Grand Canyon).
Her husband is a tech guy so he can make something work, if they can get the right equipment and satellite service.
As Threerun said Starlink. It isn't cheap but so long as you have clear view of the sky it is great. If she needs to work while moving (not her driving of course) Starlink has an option for that as well but don't know how good it is compared to setting up stationary. Many RV Youtube creators use Starlink
We just bought a house with zero cell service and no traditional high speed internet options. Starlink is working perfectly for both those functions. We'll take it with us when we travel.
She has Starlink -- that's the service that did not work when she was in CT. They were stationary at family member's horse farm in some rural area somewhere.
She says it worked fine to power a Zoom call, but doesn't have the upload speed she needs for work files.
So if Starlink was the best option...I guess she's out of luck?
She was hoping -- and I was hoping for her -- that there'd be something she hadn't heard of.
Google Starlink coverage and find out the coverage. It is great along the NW area, but certainly there are blind spots. There was a page devoted to future coverage estimates, but I haven’t looked at it in a while. Our service here is phenomenal.
From Starlink:
"Starlink users typically experience download speeds between 25 and 220 Mbps, with a majority of users experiencing speeds over 100 Mbps. Upload speeds are typically between 5 and 20 Mbps."
With upload of 5-20 Mbps, she is never going to be happy working with large video files. Unless she can find high speed internet to connect to on the road, she needs to give up the RV idea or change careers. Or get a $500,000 ground station and connect to commercial satellites.
They make hotels that come with WiFi that are nearly ubiquitous nowadays. Starlink is a massive improvement over old satellite but the bandwidth is still pretty limited. You can do Zoom, email, surf, play games poorly due to the latency... uploading large files? Not without a lot of patience. Using a cell phone or Jetpack is much faster. But then you're limited to areas with good 5G cell reception which typically is not RV parks. She might need to give up on the "need" to work from the RV and work from hotels.
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