Noob with a mifi 7730L

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robot apocalypse
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Noob with a mifi 7730L

Post by robot apocalypse »

Full time RVer here (as of a month ago), suddenly realizing I am NOT prepared for rural internet. I thought a reseller would be fine, but after waiting 3 days for tech support to get me back online, I'm nervous i got scammed.

I'm a software engineer, so i need reliable, unthrottled data, but believe it or not I don't need a ton of bandwidth; everything's in The Cloud now. I'll use it if it's available, of course 😉

I have a mifi 7730L which came with a prepaid verizon sim, a google fi sim for my phone, and some miscellany. Verizon's network seems to be the best where i like to go (the mountains of Colorado), but i can get by on T-Mobile or Sprint (as tested with my phone's hotspot via Google fi). But so far every plan i can find throttles after 15-20G (verizon) or is obscenely expensive (google fi).

What are my options? Is unthrottled data even a realistic goal on ANY network? Is my mifi hotspot junk? I'm willing to buy something if i can get it locally. This is all new to me, but if someone can give me a viable option and a rough direction, I'm confident I can figure it out. I just didn't want to waste time on a goose chase.

Thanks in advance, sorry for the very basic post, i got lost in the existing posts.

Robot
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Didneywhorl
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Re: Noob with a mifi 7730L

Post by Didneywhorl »

Sprints the easiest. Calyxinstitute.org. Donate to them a certain amount and you get a truly unlimited hotspot for about $600 a year.

Tmobile is possible via unlimited voice plans with global plus added.

Verizon is a pain, but most use Visible for unlimited data. You can get around the hotspot throttle limits.
Jon_T
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Re: Noob with a mifi 7730L

Post by Jon_T »

We have been full-time RV'ing for about 6 months now and I am still trying to figure out my setup. I would suggest having multiple carriers as sometimes you just don't know when one will work and the other won't. We have been in several areas where Verizon had no signal but ATT worked just fine.

A warning about Visible. I use it as our main internet and it works ok for streaming and for the kids to use their devices but there are two main issues.
#1) It's the lowest priority data. You can expect speeds around 25% of what postpaid Verizon gets. At least that's been my experience. We came south for the winter and a lot of the towers are pretty congested making it pretty much unusable during prime time hours. Orlando was the worst, nothing worked. Ended up having to drive to find a semi usable tower for conference calls.
#2) The high ping times make some tasks difficult/impossible. I need to connect to various databases for work, and because the ping times are so high, the applications often throw timeout errors. If I switch to the hotspot via my postpaid Verizon phone, it works fine.
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