Which WiFi is Best?

[SarahSails]

Hello Narrowboaters!

 

I am SURE this topic has been asked over and over, but its hard to find a definitive answer. For the next few years, I plan on living aboard and continuously cruising through Summer and Autumn. Unfortunately, I still need to work — but its all on my own time. I do however need good wifi once a week to teach online via Zoom.

 

My plan is to, obviously plan ahead — and try and get to an area of good reception a day ahead of my teaching day, to allow for any change of plan and the need to continue on to find better signal. I travel most of the time, and usually just buy a SIM card for a spare Phone, and teather to this to get internet on my laptop.

 

On this forum, Im finding two methods, 1. buying and antenna and a router and a proper boat set up, 2. A SIM card on a phone.

 

Given my situation, which would you suggest to get as much sweet wifi as possible and not go to mad to find it! And which company etc. would you recommend going through for the installation if the built in solution seems to be best?

 

Im not to concerned about cost, mainly concerned about ease of use, and also ease of install! 

[GUMPY]

Router and external antenna every time.

Using a phone is fine In good signal areas but you will need to keep the phone on charge all the time and with some systems if you get a phone call the WiFi drops out.

Plus having a router and a phone on a separate network can give you backup when one network is not available. For example on our mooring our phones don't work so we use WiFi calling over the router.

As for network we use Smarty which is part of 3 no contract and not overly expensive.

 

[Rob-M]

I am working on the boat at the moment, spend most of my time in Teams calls with video.

 

I use Smarty for internet as I only have to pay for a month when I need it so not paying every month.  I have a Huawei B818 router and an external aerial although I don't often use the aerial.  This has worked fine around Great Haywood where I am based.

 

You can get a free Smarty SIM and free month with my referral code if you want a sim to test out in your area https://i.smarty.co.uk/ptE8nf.

 

[Jen-in-Wellies]

You aren't asking a question about wifi, you are asking a question about 4G and to a lesser extent 5G mobile data reception and the antennas and routers that best suit receiving it. WiFi might come in to it from there. If the gadget you are using doesn't have its own SIM card and receiving circuitry and software. In my case, I currently use a 4G router supplied by Three, with the option of connecting external antenna for when I am in poor signal areas. From there, the computer I am writing this post on is connected by an ethernet cable, so no Wifi involved at all. Other gadgets o the boat are connected to the router by Wifi.

Sorry to be pedantic. A lot of people think their internet connection is wifi. In fact it is a whole chain of different things that may not even include wifi.

There are a lot of topics about this that a search will find. The best advice changes over time as things advance. A good one is below.

Jen

 

 

[doratheexplorer]

I work full time from my boat every day now and am online every day.  I typically cruise around 8 months of the year.  At no point have I needed to faff around with an external aerial.  Phone tethered to laptop works absolutely fine in all but a very few places which I know well and avoid.  Maybe 5 years or more ago, when speeds were lower, an external aerial would have been useful, but not any more, despite what many still seem to say.

 

Caveats though:

 

1.  Put your phone in the window and try windows on both sides of the boat for best speed.

2. Get yourself on a decent Network.  That means EE or Vodafone, not O2 or Three.

3. Put a speedtest app on your phone just to double check speeds are good as you're mooring up.  The signal strength bars on your phone display are not a good indicator and bear in mind that speeds can change drastically in just 20ft in either direction.  Precise mooring position is important.

 

I'll now wait for the incoming from the usual suspects...

 

[Jen-in-Wellies]

3 minutes ago, doratheexplorer said:

1.  Put your phone in the window and try windows on both sides of the boat for best speed.

All good advice from @doratheexplorer. I'll just add to this one. Watch the phone, or other receiving gadget in a window doesn't overheat. I once killed a MiFi gadget leaving it in a south facing window on what turned out to be the hottest day of that year.

The reason for putting it in a window is that most boats on the inland waterways have steel cabins these days and the radio signals from the 4G and 5G towers can't get through the steel, so can only get through windows and open doors. If you happen to have a fibreglass, or wooden cabin boat, then you get better reception. These can come with other problems though!

Jen

[blackrose]

26 minutes ago, Loddon said:

Router and external antenna every time.

Using a phone is fine In good signal areas but you will need to keep the phone on charge all the time and with some systems if you get a phone call the WiFi drops out.

Plus having a router and a phone on a separate network can give you backup when one network is not available. For example on our mooring our phones don't work so we use WiFi calling over the router.

As for network we use Smarty which is part of 3 no contract and not overly expensive.

 

 

Yes, I used a phone in my window as a mobile hotspot wirelessly tethered to my laptop for years, even for work. It's fine for internet in good signal areas but falls apart when some idiot calls you and you're in the middle of a Teams work meeting. I'm now moored in a very weak signal area so on the advice of Loddon I'm using the 3 network with a router and external antenna, and Smarty for my phone. It only costs me about £5/month more than I was paying before and now I have wi-fi on the boat and don't need to put my keep putting my phone in the window to do anything.  

[Slow and Steady]

10 minutes ago, doratheexplorer said:

2. Get yourself on a decent Network.  That means EE or Vodafone, not O2 or Three.

I was a Vodafone fan for many years as they rolled out their network much faster than the others (I designed 100's of their sites). I also liked them because they employed all the maverick engineers and a LOT of female engineers. The East region head engineer was a gay guy with pink hair - what's not to like! But in all honesty their coverage is no better than 3 these days IME... and 3 do good all you can eat data deals.

 

Phone on 3 nowhere near a window works fine here but I'm in a marina where the coverage is good.

[doratheexplorer]

3 minutes ago, Slow and Steady said:

I was a Vodafone fan for many years as they rolled out their network much faster than the others (I designed 100's of their sites). I also liked them because they employed all the maverick engineers and a LOT of female engineers. The East region head engineer was a gay guy with pink hair - what's not to like! But in all honesty their coverage is no better than 3 these days IME... and 3 do good all you can eat data deals.

 

Phone on 3 nowhere near a window works fine here but I'm in a marina where the coverage is good.

The coverage maybe similar, but the speeds are better on Vodafone and far more reliable.  Three will often show as 2 or 3 bar on your phone, but when you're using it all day, it's common for speed to fluctuate wildly which causes constant buffering on Teams/Zoom calls.  Things like iplayer, netflix don't suffer as much because they're usually buffering ahead by about a minute which smooths out these troughs.  Also, with Zoom/Teams, upload speed is very important too.  I was finding I might have over 2mbps download but 0.1mbps upload.  I switched from Three to Voda and the download/upload speeds are more even.  I've seen similar good results on EE and their piggybackers.

 

The best thing which can be said for Three, and their piggybackers, is that they're cheap.  People should ask themselves why though.  If you don't need reliable internet for work, they may be a good option, but I certainly won't be going back.

[alias]

45 minutes ago, Loddon said:

Using a phone is fine In good signal areas but you will need to keep the phone on charge all the time and with some systems if you get a phone call the WiFi drops out.

 

As an occasional user, I found a "do not disturb" function on my phone handy to deal with this. This automatically routed calls to voicemail either manually or when there was something scheduled in my diary. 

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, doratheexplorer said:

The coverage maybe similar, but the speeds are better on Vodafone and far more reliable.  Three will often show as 2 or 3 bar on your phone, but when you're using it all day, it's common for speed to fluctuate wildly which causes constant buffering on Teams/Zoom calls.  Things like iplayer, netflix don't suffer as much because they're usually buffering ahead by about a minute which smooths out these troughs.  Also, with Zoom/Teams, upload speed is very important too.  I was finding I might have over 2mbps download but 0.1mbps upload.  I switched from Three to Voda and the download/upload speeds are more even.  I've seen similar good results on EE and their piggybackers.

 

The best thing which can be said for Three, and their piggybackers, is that they're cheap.  People should ask themselves why though.  If you don't need reliable internet for work, they may be a good option, but I certainly won't be going back.

 

Its often argued about on here but we use internet extensively across the UK and we too switched from 3 to EE years ago as we often found 3 lacking. Often in towns too, not just very rural areas.

 

Im out of contract again with EE next month and even though they are by far not the cheapest I cant see myself swappping. If I do it will be to one of their piggy backers.

[Idle Days]

I have an external aerial connected to an internet router. Currently I'm using EE on a monthly unlimited data contract, which is expensive but is working well, I have previously used 3 but I was not satisfied with their poor service .

 

Coverage and service level varies greatly around the system, so I suggest that you try and find an internet provider that give a strong signal in you cruising area as a priority.

 

Cheap and useless is not much of a bargain.

[GUMPY]

28 minutes ago, The Happy Nomad said:

Its often argued about on here but we use internet extensively across the UK and we too switched from 3 to EE years ago as we often found 3 lacking. Often in towns too, not just very rural areas.

Interestingly 3 and EE share a lot of masts under some agreement or other so I find it odd that they differ by so much.

[Tony1]

1 hour ago, doratheexplorer said:

I work full time from my boat every day now and am online every day.  I typically cruise around 8 months of the year.  At no point have I needed to faff around with an external aerial.  Phone tethered to laptop works absolutely fine in all but a very few places which I know well and avoid.  Maybe 5 years or more ago, when speeds were lower, an external aerial would have been useful, but not any more, despite what many still seem to say.

 

Caveats though:

 

1.  Put your phone in the window and try windows on both sides of the boat for best speed.

2. Get yourself on a decent Network.  That means EE or Vodafone, not O2 or Three.

3. Put a speedtest app on your phone just to double check speeds are good as you're mooring up.  The signal strength bars on your phone display are not a good indicator and bear in mind that speeds can change drastically in just 20ft in either direction.  Precise mooring position is important.

 

I'll now wait for the incoming from the usual suspects...

 

 

I worked part time from my boat for a year whilst CCing (mostly teams calls etc), and I agree with most of what you say Dora. 

 

Above all, the network seems especially important in my experience.  

I thought it would be a smart move to have SIMs from networks that didnt use the same infrastructure/towers etc. 

I already had an EE SIM in my phone so I upgraded the data to 120Gb (although they only allow 100GB of tethering when I last checked, which can be a pain).

As a contingency plan, I added an O2 SIM with 250Gb, that I put into a mifi router thing.

 

Problem was that I got the SIMs the wrong way round.

EE performs way better almost everywhere I've compared them, and 90% of the time if I am struggling, it will be the EE SIM that works, NOT the O2 SIM.

So the EE SIM should be the one inside the mifi unit. 

So if doing it again I would use an EE SIM in a mifi, and maybe have a Vodafone SIM in my actual phone as a backup. Or maybe a second EE SIM.

Now with that said, there have been maybe two or three locations over the last 18 months where O2 worked (barely) and EE did not work. At the moment I'm in a place where the O2 is a tad better. But that is very rare, and even at its best, O2 its not as good as EE. 

 

The 100Gb tethering limit on EE is a concern, and I've fallen foul of it a few times, so I would look into getting a data-only SIM for the mifi unit, which allows more than 100Gb. 

 

But where I would differ with you Dora is on the need for a mifi unit. 

There were times when my phone has hanging in a window keeping my internet connection going, and I needed to make a call, or take one. 

Trying to hold a phone up to the window whilst talking about some complex problem (and view the laptop screen at the same time) gets a bit tiresome, so having a second (cheap) phone that can hold a SIM and hang in the window, or else a dedicated mifi unit, is for me a better option than relying on a single phone). 

 

I did replace the mifi unit with a router in the end (Huawei B535 I think, on the recommendation of the chaps here), plus an external aerial.

The thing about the external aerial is convenience really. I'm not sure if it really has to be 6ft or more (mine is), or whether its only important that it is outside the shell of the boat to get a better signal, but certainly you can tell that you get a better signal when standing outside with a phone than you do when inside the boat- and I think an aerial just recreates that for you.

Raising the aerial on a 6ft mast is obviously supposed to help deal with 'shadow' signal areas overlooked by hills etc, but tbh I've not been anywhere (since I got it) that I've felt needed the extra height.

So my recommendation would be for an external aerial- but I dont know from personal experience if you can get away with a small 30cm one that magnetically sits on the roof, or whether you need a 6ft one. 

 

I suspect its about convenience as much as necessity.

For example, the 6ft mast and aerial should allow me to moor in places where I otherwise couldnt get a signal, and that's a nice to have feature, but not essential. 

When I didnt have the mast, I just kept moving the boat further on until I got a signal. 

Missing out on mooring in some nice locations is not the end of the world, but if a £100 aerial on a mast allows me to use those mooring spots, some would say its worth it. 

If you live and work on the Llangollen, you might think its worth getting a mast for some areas, but it might be a different story elsewhere, e.g. I found the poor signal areas were much less common around Northampton and on my way North. 

 

 

Edited February 17, 2022 by Tony1

[alias]

1 minute ago, Loddon said:

Interestingly 3 and EE share a lot of masts under some agreement or other so I find it odd that they differ by so much.

 

I think these things change over time too. For example the signal in Braunston used to be bad for all near the marina. A few years ago it got better there for 3 on a 3G mifi. Last year it got unusable for my 3G mifi there, but was fine on a 4G phone. 

 

As all the networks move away from 2 and 3G the picture changes. Mergers and acquisions have also changed the picture over the years, sometimes resulting in consolidation and retirement of some cell towers with impacts on coverage. 

 

I think the usual boating adage applies that if something is important (e.g. your livelihood depends on it) it's worth having two ways to do it. As you say pairing 3/O2 or EE/Voda would theoretically give the best chance of signal. In practice though some places seem marginal for all (eg Crick, Blue Lias, Oxford summit), although possible to overcome with good aerials. 

[Guest]

31 minutes ago, Loddon said:

Interestingly 3 and EE share a lot of masts under some agreement or other so I find it odd that they differ by so much.

 

I can only report what I found as an end user. My final straw with 3 was when holiday in the North lakes and MrsHN could get calls and internet on EE and I couldn't even get enough signal to make a voice call on 3. As I was out of contract with them I dumped them.

 

That said I've been with EE for a good few years now so maybe 3 have improved?

 

One spot I havent had a signal on EE is in the Midlands curiously close to the M1 too. But none of the other networks had signal either.

 

Which is what I tend to find. If EE doesnt work none do.

[doratheexplorer]

41 minutes ago, Tony1 said:

 

I worked part time from my boat for a year whilst CCing (mostly teams calls etc), and I agree with most of what you say Dora. 

 

Above all, the network seems especially important in my experience.  

I thought it would be a smart move to have SIMs from networks that didnt use the same infrastructure/towers etc. 

I already had an EE SIM in my phone so I upgraded the data to 120Gb (although they only allow 100GB of tethering when I last checked, which can be a pain).

As a contingency plan, I added an O2 SIM with 250Gb, that I put into a mifi router thing.

 

Problem was that I got the SIMs the wrong way round.

EE performs way better almost everywhere I've compared them, and 90% of the time if I am struggling, it will be the EE SIM that works, NOT the O2 SIM.

So the EE SIM should be the one inside the mifi unit. 

So if doing it again I would use an EE SIM in a mifi, and maybe have a Vodafone SIM in my actual phone as a backup. Or maybe a second EE SIM.

Now with that said, there have been maybe two or three locations over the last 18 months where O2 worked (barely) and EE did not work. At the moment I'm in a place where the O2 is a tad better. But that is very rare, and even at its best, O2 its not as good as EE. 

 

The 100Gb tethering limit on EE is a concern, and I've fallen foul of it a few times, so I would look into getting a data-only SIM for the mifi unit, which allows more than 100Gb. 

 

But where I would differ with you Dora is on the need for a mifi unit. 

There were times when my phone has hanging in a window keeping my internet connection going, and I needed to make a call, or take one. 

Trying to hold a phone up to the window whilst talking about some complex problem (and view the laptop screen at the same time) gets a bit tiresome, so having a second (cheap) phone that can hold a SIM and hang in the window, or else a dedicated mifi unit, is for me a better option than relying on a single phone). 

 

I did replace the mifi unit with a router in the end (Huawei B535 I think, on the recommendation of the chaps here), plus an external aerial.

The thing about the external aerial is convenience really. I'm not sure if it really has to be 6ft or more (mine is), or whether its only important that it is outside the shell of the boat to get a better signal, but certainly you can tell that you get a better signal when standing outside with a phone than you do when inside the boat- and I think an aerial just recreates that for you.

Raising the aerial on a 6ft mast is obviously supposed to help deal with 'shadow' signal areas overlooked by hills etc, but tbh I've not been anywhere (since I got it) that I've felt needed the extra height.

So my recommendation would be for an external aerial- but I dont know from personal experience if you can get away with a small 30cm one that magnetically sits on the roof, or whether you need a 6ft one. 

 

I suspect its about convenience as much as necessity.

For example, the 6ft mast and aerial should allow me to moor in places where I otherwise couldnt get a signal, and that's a nice to have feature, but not essential. 

When I didnt have the mast, I just kept moving the boat further on until I got a signal. 

Missing out on mooring in some nice locations is not the end of the world, but if a £100 aerial on a mast allows me to use those mooring spots, some would say its worth it. 

If you live and work on the Llangollen, you might think its worth getting a mast for some areas, but it might be a different story elsewhere, e.g. I found the poor signal areas were much less common around Northampton and on my way North. 

 

 

Some fair points there.

 

Remember though that the OP was talking about getting a company to come and install a system for her, but then said she was looking for "ease of install".  It read to me like she'd fallen for the idea that you need some kind of expensive, complicated system in order to work remotely on a boat.  You don't.  Sticking a phone in the window is dead easy and works.  Sticking a mi-fi box in the window is also easy and works.  Neither needs a company to come and install it. 

 

I have a personal mobile and a work mobile.  I tether to my personal mobile when I'm working and don't answer it then anyway.  My work mobile gets used.  I take the point though, that if you have one phone which only works in the window and you need to make a call, it can be an issue.  Sounds like you've found a solution which works for you.

 

 

[Jen-in-Wellies]

What @alias said. With boating, important things need to have back ups. For example, I did use an Android phone as a hot spot on occasion. An automagic software update from the phone manufacturer completely borked the hot spot side of things and was never fixed. If that had been my only way of getting on-line for a laptop, I'd have had a day or two trying to sort out another method.

Edited February 17, 2022 by Jen-in-Wellies

[blackrose]

1 hour ago, alias said:

 

As an occasional user, I found a "do not disturb" function on my phone handy to deal with this. This automatically routed calls to voicemail either manually or when there was something scheduled in my diary. 

 

Yes, I tried that but for some reason it still disrupted the mobile wi-fi hotspot on the phone.

[blackrose]

2 hours ago, doratheexplorer said:

 

2. Get yourself on a decent Network.  That means EE or Vodafone, not O2 or Three.

 

 

Interestingly Three (and Smarty) work well at my current location but not Vodafone. I used to be with Vodafone but never found the service very good. O2 was much better. Not sure about EE service here - I think I spoke to someone who's using it. Everyone else is with Three.

Edited February 17, 2022 by blackrose

[Tony1]

20 minutes ago, doratheexplorer said:

Some fair points there.

 

Remember though that the OP was talking about getting a company to come and install a system for her, but then said she was looking for "ease of install".  It read to me like she'd fallen for the idea that you need some kind of expensive, complicated system in order to work remotely on a boat.  You don't.  Sticking a phone in the window is dead easy and works.  Sticking a mi-fi box in the window is also easy and works.  Neither needs a company to come and install it. 

 

I have a personal mobile and a work mobile.  I tether to my personal mobile when I'm working and don't answer it then anyway.  My work mobile gets used.  I take the point though, that if you have one phone which only works in the window and you need to make a call, it can be an issue.  Sounds like you've found a solution which works for you.

 

 

 

I did exactly the same as you- I tethered from my personal mobile to provide an internet connection for work (EE was just always better than the work phone), and that left my work phone free for calls. Problem I had was that sometimes, the work phone had a poor signal, so I had to hold the work phone up to the window and put it on speaker in order to talk to people, whilst trying to balance the laptop somewhere near the window, where I could still see it without turning my head too far away from the mic on the work phone that was up in the window (if I turned to look at the laptop whilst talking they struggled to hear me). 

Fortunately, most people started using teams even for voice calls during my final year, so the reality was that the work phone wasn't often used.

 

And I have to say, as far as I can recall, the phone or mifi in the window did work ok almost all of the time, all the way from Ely to Nantwich.

It was only when I went on the Llan, and some spots around Cheshire, that I struggled and found some proper dead spots. 

 

But as you said, you can just move the boat on. It can occasionally be a pain if its getting into the evening and you just want to get moored up and have something to eat, and make sure you're ok for internet the next day, but you find that your nice location has no signal. But there always the option to just keep moving, so its nothing you cant deal with to be fair. 

 

I would have an external aerial for the convenience of not having a phone or mifi hung in the window, but you can do without it- in fact I did for a year. 

 

ETA- on the ease of install thing: you could run an aerial cable up a wall and out of a mushroom vent to save drilling holes, and then connect it to a magnetic mounted aerial on the roof.  

Again, its down to personal judgement, preferences, and circumstances (and possibly what area of the country). 

 

Edited February 17, 2022 by Tony1

[Idle Days]

IT may not suit the OP but dual SIM routers are available. You can instal SIMs from different providers and the unit will then pick the best signal for you. 

 

Depends how important an internet connection is to you.

 

[alias]

29 minutes ago, Tony1 said:

Problem I had was that sometimes, the work phone had a poor signal, so I had to hold the work phone up to the window and put it on speaker in order to talk to people, whilst trying to balance the laptop somewhere near the window, where I could still see it without turning my head too far away from the mic on the work phone that was up in the window (if I turned to look at the laptop whilst talking they struggled to hear me). 

 

A bluetooth headset is a big help in these circumstances - the phone can be where it needs to be (within several metres) and you have both hands free to use the laptop.

[Jim Batty]

On 17/02/2022 at 08:42, doratheexplorer said:

I work full time from my boat every day now and am online every day.  I typically cruise around 8 months of the year.  At no point have I needed to faff around with an external aerial.  Phone tethered to laptop works absolutely fine in all but a very few places which I know well and avoid.  Maybe 5 years or more ago, when speeds were lower, an external aerial would have been useful, but not any more, despite what many still seem to say.

 

Caveats though:

 

1.  Put your phone in the window and try windows on both sides of the boat for best speed.

2. Get yourself on a decent Network.  That means EE or Vodafone, not O2 or Three.

3. Put a speedtest app on your phone just to double check speeds are good as you're mooring up.  The signal strength bars on your phone display are not a good indicator and bear in mind that speeds can change drastically in just 20ft in either direction.  Precise mooring position is important.

 

I'll now wait for the incoming from the usual suspects...

 

 

A caveat to your caveat. The best network is going to depend on where you're cruising. We gave up on Vodafone after a couple of years -- absolutely hopeless all across NW and W London GUC, great swathes of the Thames and the eastern end of the K&A. Curiously, to this day, the Vodafone signal is terrible in and around Newbury ... home of Vodafone HQ.

 

In all those places I cited above, we've had no problem on the 3 network.

 

Last autumn I 12v hardwired a Huawei B535 router on the boat. Where I used to get 1-2 bars signal with just a dongle plugged into my laptop, I then got 3-4 bars on wifi with the Huawei mounted at head height inside the boat. A few months after that I hooked up the router to a Poynter arial on a 0.5m pole on the roof ... and got 4-5 bars signal in the same spot. (I know 'bars' aren't precise, but they can be a general indicator, especially if you're tied up in the middle of nowhere and not sharing the signal with many other users.)

 

All that said, sometimes the (Three) phone signal is stronger than the (Three) router signal ... but I'd say 80% of the time the router signal is stronger than that of the phone.

 

Our experience, for what it's worth.

 

 

[RS2021]

On 17/02/2022 at 08:42, doratheexplorer said:

Put a speedtest app on your phone just to double check speeds are good as you're mooring up.

Be very careful if you are lucky enough to have 5G. The way speed tests work, the faster the connection the more data they use. Using speed tests on 5G will gobble up your allowance (unless you are unlimited) in no time.