When we lived in the house, we had AT&T U-Verse for TV and Internet. About two years ago we decided to join the ranks of the “cord cutters” and ditched the TV part of our U-verse subscription. We only kept the 18Mb Internet connection. It worked well, was reliable, and I had the house thoroughly wired with Gigabit Ethernet and complete Wi-Fi coverage. At each TV was a dedicated computer that ran Windows Media Center and an Apple TV. All this was tied back to a central NAS storage system containing a vast library of movies and TV shows I had accumulated over the years. An over the air antenna, subscription to Netflix, access to iTunes, and even some BitTorrent all joined together had sufficed for the past two years to give us all we needed to watch TV our own way. Sometimes live sports were a little bit difficult, with no ESPN or Fox Sports. A full subscription to MLB.tv got us our Texas Ranger’s games (with a little geo-hacking to get around the stupid blackout restrictions) and the Cowboys are on over the air for free.
We managed to watch everything we wanted, when we wanted, and how we wanted. It was easy to transfer TV shows or movies from the home network to an iPad when we traveled, for TV on the go for the flight, or a lazy evening in the hotel.
I started adapting our way of consuming TV to the RV almost immediately. I rewired the TV’s in the RV to accommodate new Windows Media Centers, running on laptops. Everything was tied into the surround sound systems. I added a shelf under the desk to accommodate the NAS, and retired all my servers and domain for a simple “home group” styled network. This might be the smallest and simplest personal LAN I have run in over two decades!
When the time came to actually move into the RV, it was all ready to go. We had Kathy’s laptop, my laptop, two TV laptops, a couple iPads, iPhones, an Xbox, and a couple Apple TV’s (and that’s a big downgrade in number of devices from what we had at the house!).
The problems started right off the bat. The internal network in the RV (LAN) was just not robust. It downright was on the verge of not useable. I would try to copy a video from my laptop to a TV, and it would take hours. Just ridiculously slow. I was not happy. This had to be fixed.
My first step was to replace the Wi-Fi router. I bought a new highly rated ASUS 802.11ac router. I got a couple new 802.11ac adapters for the TV laptops. The Apple TV, iPads, and iPhones all use 802.11n, as well as Kathy’s laptop and my laptop. I moved all these Wi-Fi connections off the popular 2.4GHz spectrum to the 5GHz spectrum where there is less interference from other stuff, such as microwaves and neighbors. Suddenly my internal network in the RV was much better. I could push video files in a matter of minutes instead of hours. The signal strength penetration through walls was much higher. The LAN was now working the way I wanted it to.
Internet access still sucked. Bad. Our only choice initially was an AT&T 3G hotspot. I tied this hotspot into my router to provide access to all my stuff. It was severely under powered. Kathy would scan a couple documents and the syncing between her laptop and mine would bring the network to a crawl. Internet access was spotty, flat didn’t work, or was just so slow you couldn’t open sites like Facebook. The 3G device was not cutting it. The 5 Gb limit each month was just not enough either. I used 21 GB on my 5 Gb limit the first month. Ouch, ouch and double ouch! And that was cutting back on all kinds of stuff. I guess I just got used to or just flat spoiled by the unlimited U-verse Internet we had for years.
I switched to an LTE device. Performance was much better and the system would not bog down as quickly. But there was still just too much data moving between computers. I have all our documents, pictures and stuff replicating between computers, the cloud, even my work computer. Sort of a distributed backup of all our data. I’m talking a half terabyte of data. This turns out to be a way bigger data hog than I ever imagined. I switched software I was using for distribution, Cubby, to a brand new software called BTSync. It has a great feature to throttle the speed over the Internet, but allowing full speed transfers locally between computers. This greatly facilitated the speed of our Internet, and reduced the amount of data I was moving daily. So far it’s working well and I am happy with it. I am still using quite a bit of data, going over my limits, but not nearly as much. I’m working on changing that too, but that’s hard to do given the limitations of working with phone companies.
Now from a laptop, or iPhone, or iPad, I can pull up music, TV shows, or movies, and send them to whichever TV I want, or even both of them at the same time. This is great for filling the whole RV with music, as Kathy has the most eclectic and interesting playlist in the world. It’s all integrated and smart, at least when it works. Sometimes it does break down. Simple for me to fix, but Kathy always says if I ever die, she won’t be able to watch TV ever again. 🙂
It’s been a big challenge to build a technologically advanced TV system in an RV. I am succeeding slowly, but at least I am succeeding. I still have to tie in the external TV and sound system, but until the summer heat breaks, that will have to wait. I hope all that I am learning now, from limited speeds, to limited Internet access, will come in very handy when the expat portion of this adventure begins. My research indicates the Internet in Ecuador probably won’t be any better or faster. I’m guessing Ecuador is not going to be that much different from an RV, at least when it comes to TV and Internet.