My internet needs on the boat would be zero, but I like to be able to work from the boat occasionally, and I like for my son to be able to do schoolwork there while I work on boat systems.
And once I have internet access, I may as well use it to experiment with remote telemetry for things like bilge pump activity, engine and charger temperature, engine run time, battery status, etc.
This page describes how I did each, so far.
San Francisco may be the beating heart of innovation, birthplace of Silicon Valley, etc etc, but the LTE access can be rather garbage. Put your receiving antenna in a box full of wiring amid a forest of masts and float it on water and reliability goes to zero, even 100 meters from a ballpark that can handle tens of thousands of fans.
Speed tests on several providers (Verizon, T-Mobile, Google) were highly variable with wild error bars and high latency, with Verizon being the best but woefully insufficient. At times Verizon would suffice for tethering, but it would cut out intermittently. Some examples:
| DL (Mbps) | UL (Mbps) | Ping-Idle | Ping-DL | Ping-UL | Provider |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4.08 | 4.74 | 80 | 1318 | 759 | T-Mobile |
| 64.33 | 15.12 | 30 | 1380 | 495 | Verizon (Dock) |
| 20.8 | 7.71 | 55 | 1637 | 793 | Verizon (Saloon) |
My first attempts were with various consumer-level LTE modems or ‘mifi’-style objects. This is the type of device typically sold by your provider and meant to be portable. They present several difficulties (eg, no ability to add an antenna) and aren’t meant for sustained use; batteries can explode, etc. They were no better, at best, than a phone and frequently worse.
I wanted POE so I could power it with one cable, and the option of external antennas to deal with the nightmarish radio situation overall in a marina. My first selection was an attempt to get out of this cheaply, a CAT4 Huawei device:
This failed spectacularly. It ran a terrible custom firmware, and didn’t actually allow external antennas anyway (despite the product claiming to). It was probably also sending my traffic to somewhere in China (I did actually verify it was attempting to contact something in China frequently.)
Rather than fool around, I settled on a CAT12 device:
‘CAT12’ means it can employ multiple bands (think ‘channels’) from multiple provider antennas simultaneously. Higher is better. Your iPhone is a CAT16 device because reliability is very important to snooty phone consumers.
This is powered by ‘GoldenOrb’, a popular firmware based on OpenWRT. It can be powered over 12v directly and should I need to add external antennas I can do so easily. If I do, I plan on getting the following from Wireless Haven.
600-3800Mhz 2x2 MIMO 5G Ready 6dBi Omni-Directional Cellular Antenna with Marine Base