Our Nest on Wheels

But more than that, I still like a real telephone handset, not a computer tablet that you rest next to your head and hope to hear. I like the convenience of having a phone in every room so you can just answer wherever you are.  I like the convenience of a phone that doesn't need to spend 2 hours a day on a charger.  So when we started thinking about traveling full-time in an RV, I had to plan out what we would use for phone service.  The simplest answer is to just use a cellphone.  But if you know me, you know that I like to explore all my options.

And I found a way to have my landline in my motorhome.  What?  How do you do that?  Well, it's not actually a landline, of course, it just appears to be one, and our setup uses all the normal landline phone handsets that we currently have in our house.  The trick to this is something called a "home base".  This is a small base unit that takes a cellphone SIM card and creates a connection to a cellular network.  But on the back of it, you plug in your normal typical home phone. Or multiple home phones.  Or a wireless home phone.


I've been using mine for about a year now, and I have my entire house plugged into it.  So all my home phones, and I have a bunch of them - wired and wireless, all work just like they did with a landline.  When we move into the motorhome, the homebase will come along and we'll take a few wireless handsets.  The nice thing is that you can continue to call us using our normal home phone number, the number we've had for 29 years, and it will find us in our new home, no matter where we are in the US.

Most of us have become accustomed to having high speed internet access in our homes. So much of what we do now involves a connection to the internet. We, like many of you, have "cut the cord" to our cable TV and now use the cable company only for internet access; we stream most of our video entertainment from Netflix, Roku, or SlingTV, and we use over-the-air TV for things like the local new broadcast. And of course we'll be communicating via email, looking up new locations on google maps, paying bills and doing banking online. This means that a reliable internet connection while traveling in a motorhome is a need, not a want.


So, how do you do it? As it turns out, the cable company is unwilling to provide a hardwired connection to a moving vehicle. Who knew? The same is true for ATT DSL or U-verse. And satellite internet, which can be useful for remote locations where cable isn't available, does not really work for the mobile community, as the setup is specific to your geographic location.

So most RVers use a combination of a couple of types of access—typically campground-provided Wi-Fi and a cellular "hotspot" or MiFi device. We will do that also, but with an added component to make life easier. As you can imagine, setting up your PC, smartphone, tablets, etc., to use every different Wi-Fi setup you use as you travel would be a pain. And then switching them over to your MiFi device when Wi-Fi doesn't work would be another pain. But there is a class of routers that is made just for this type of setup.

The type of router that we will get can use a cellular hotspot (or MiFi) as the internet connection and then create a local network within the motorhome for all our devices to connect to. So far this is very much similar to a cable internet connection in a house, except that the internet part is via a cellular hotspot. But the added feature that these routers have is the ability to create their internet connection via available Wi-Fi. This is called Wi-Fi as WAN, or WAW. And the router is smart enough to use the Wi-Fi connection first; it will switch over to the more expensive cellular connection only if the Wi-Fi isn't very good. The benefit of this is that we should never need to change the connection on our devices (PC, tablets, smartphones, etc.). They just connect to our local network, and the router takes care of the rest. If the camp Wi-Fi isn't very strong, we can add an antenna and pull in the signal from a long distance away, sometimes as far as half a mile.

So, that's the plan. We'll see how it plays out and how well it works. But there are a lot of people who do work online and travel full-time in their RV, so we know that it can be done . . . for a price.  More on that later.