(Phone ringing)
Shaun! It's me!
Fnar fnar fnar fnar fnar!
What are you on about? Errr, It's been two weeks.
Don't you think we ought to be doing another vlog?
Fnar fnar fnar fnar fnar!
Who're you trying to be? Mr Cholmodley Warner or summat?
Fnar fnar fnar fnar fnar!
I've had enough of this. I'm cutting you off. I'm on me way around
(Cuts phone line)
Rude!
Morning! Welcome to narrowboat Silver Fox again. You like saying that, don't you?
Today on this vlog we're going to show you how we've got the internet and Wi-Fi onboard
narrowboat Silver Fox. When we got into the design of the boat, there were three
things that we really wanted. One was the pull-out bed so we can have a big bed.
Two, was the TV. We wanted a nice big TV in the saloon and one in the bedroom.
And the third was Internet. We really need good internet on narrowboat Silver Fox.
otherwise we can't really upload vlogs or watch anything onYouTube.
We can't interact with you on social media on Twitter and Facebook and
Instagram, and we also need the internet for our monitored alarm. We've got a CCTV
system going in and we've also got Netflix on the TV. Like with most of the
things on narrowboat Silver Fox we've done quite a lot of research to make
sure that it's the best for us because everybody's different and we've all got
different needs. So we wanted something that really matches what we need.
At Crick last year we saw a few options there. Expensive wasn't it? I think some people
were taking the mickey. A bit pricey! When you see what we've got in the
budget we've got it for. So this really... it boils down to three. If you're
not really going to use the internet that much, maybe just for I don't know
social media and emails and things like that, you can just use you phone. Yeah.
Because most phones come with a data plan now and you can just use that.
The problem with that is that... don't forget you're in a steel tube so the reception
is not as good in a steel tube as it would be outside. And then the other
negative to that is that if you in say you're moored in an area that's not got
a really good mobile signal anyway and you're in a steel tube, then it's even worse.
So that's not really an option for us. We use so much data that that wasn't
gonna work for us. Second one is these little things called
well, they're dongles or MiFi some of them are called. These are like little mobile
devices that get the internet and then you can use that internet on your phone
or on your laptop if you've got a computer on board. Yeah, it's like a little
Wi-Fi thing. Yeah, a little Wi-Fi dongle. And these cost anything from well free really.
If you get it on a contract. Up to like £50 - £60
for really good ones. Again the problem with these is they're relying on
the signal, so you sometimes see boaters hanging these in the windows to try and
get the best signal, and it's not really that much better than a phone. It just
means that you can get the Wi-Fi across the boat, or a portion of the boat rather
than just using your phone. The third option is to go for an external antenna.
This is the best one for us because it's outside the boat, so it's going to
get the best reception. The wires come in to the boat into a router which then
sends it out throughout the boat as Wi-Fi.
That's the choice for us.
So I'm up on the roof of narrow boat Silver Fox.
It's a very windy day and we've got people working so it is a bit noisy. This is our
external antenna. When it comes to external antenna choices you've got a
couple of options. There's the directional antennas and
omnidirectional antennas. Now, a directional one has to be in line of
sight of the cell tower that is picking the signal up from. There's a couple of
positives and negatives for this. The positives are that the signals are
generally stronger on the directional ones. The negatives are that it can only
receive it from that one tower that you've got it focused on. And the other
negatives are if that tower goes down or it's got really busy traffic, lots of
people using it, the signal will be slower. Now this is a Poynting XPOL-01
omnidirectional external antenna. Omnidirectional means it receives signal
from 360 degrees, so it's not concentrated on one tower. The benefits
for us with that are that we've got really 360 degree signal.
So it will pick up the signal from the strongest, nearest tower. We've positioned
the antenna down towards the front of the boat on the roof near the bow, which
is where I'm sat. Basically, well away from the electrics on the boat and the
engine, so it cuts down, it minimises the amount of interference it receives.
Inside the antenna there's two separate elements, each of those has a cable, so
two cables coming out from the antenna, come down this, goes down into the boat
and along to the router. So the other thing we had to think about was how to
mount the antenna on the roof. Now we've seen a few different options. Some people
just hang them from windows. Some people put great big long poles down at the
bow or the stern of the boat. We didn't fancy that. It looks a bit unsightly and
it's just a bit of a pain to take down when you cruising all the time, so we've
gone for this. This is actually a magnetic... You can just see there I can
lift that off there. I can rest the antenna down on top of the boat, so if
we've got any low bridges or tunnels, anything where we don't want it ripping
off, we can just use this magnetic pole. It's really solid, it sticks to the top
of the boat really well and if it's really windy it's not going to move, and
even if we do just catch the top, that's why we've left this little gap just at
the top, if it does get caught it just knocks it over it doesn't cause any
damage to the antenna or to the cables inside.
We've insulated the cables
and run them separately from the power cables in the boat just to avoid any
electrical interference to that data signal. They come down the centre of the
boat and we're just in the centre where the router's going to be on this shelf.
And this is where the cables come out. So these are from the external antenna
outside. You can just see the white cables, and they've got a little small
SMA male connector plug just on each one, and they will fit into the back of the router.
But which router do go for? There's just hundreds on the market and the way
around that is just think what do you need the router to do? Have you got any
wired devices? We've got two TVs that are wired by ethernet cable, so for us it had
to have at least two wired inputs. Do you want Wi-Fi throughout your boat?
The strength of Wi-Fi can differ on these routers. Some are not really that
strong and some are really super strong. So that was important for us that we
have good Wi-Fi throughout the boat. Is it locked to a particular network?
Some routers you can get on a contract from a network and the sim that they give you
will only work in that router. If you choose not to stay with that network
because you don't like the coverage and put another sim it might not work, so
just be careful that you're not getting a locked router that you might be kind
of stuck in a contract for two years with. And what upload and download speeds
do you want? For us when we're uploading vlogs to YouTube we need quite a good 4G
speed. We need quite a good speed to upload the vlogs. So the one we've chosen
has got great upload and download speeds. So when we took all this into account
there was one router that kind of shone out from the rest of them, and that's the
one I'm gonna show you. It's a Huawei 4G router. It's the model B525.
I've put a link just down below if you want to check this out.
You can get it on Amazon for at the time we recorded this vlog about £125.
This is really just plug and play. You just take it out of the box plug it in and
I'm going to show you exactly how it works. Okay, let's take it out of the box.
I've never done an unboxing video before! Okay, so ok I've done this already so I'm
just going to show you. So I've actually brought the sim. We've got 2 sims and
I'll show you what we're gonna do with those. So this is the router, actually
quite a big piece of kit. We've got it... You can get it in black or... well, it's
like a black and gold, or you can get it in white. Because we've got a kind of a
black accent running through the boat we've got it in black.
You've got the indicators just on here which I'll show you in a second, and on
the back you can see the two SMA inputs. This is where the external antenna are
gonna plug in. You can also see we've got four inputs on the back for our wired devices.
Got a power input just there. Got a USB output so we can use it for
connecting straight to our laptop or computer.
And right at the bottom, if I just undo this little flap, you can just see where
we put the sim inside. Now this is a Cat 6 router. (Over my head) Yeah, me as well!
It's actually a really fast, efficient router. 64 different Wi-Fi devices can use this and
it just means, Cat 6 means that it will keep up with the amount of work, okay, so
it doesn't slow down if you've got quite a few devices working from it.
The Wi-Fi easily covers the entire length of the boat. We've already checked this out and
I'll demonstrate that for you in a second.
It can handle download speeds of about 300 megabits per second. Now our 4G
usually is between well anything between 2 or 3 megabits per second up to about
70 I think the fastest I've seen is 100, so 300 is easily within the
range and we should be able to cope with that. We can also upload up to 50
megabits per second. Again 4G upload speeds tend to max out about 20 to 30
megabits per second, so again well within what we need. And power wise we're
actually going to run it through a 12 volt adapter and we've worked out the
power usage if we leave it on for 10 to 12 hours a day which is all we'll need
it for, it's going to use about 0.8 amp powers per hour, so virtually no drain on
the battery at all, especially if we're out cruising, we're not even going to
notice it's on. Right, let's plug this thing in and show you how it works.
Right, so we're in the corner of the saloon where the cables are ready. Got the
router here. So first thing to do is to put the SIM card in the router. All we do
is we've got our SIM here. Now we're using a 3 network SIM. Just goes in the bottom
in there. So we've put the SIM card in there. You'll feel it when you push it in,
it's just like a little spring. Just put the cover back on there to protect it,
there we go. So the second thing we're going to do is we're going to just wire
the SMA plugs that come down from the external antenna into the back of the router.
So these are the two SMA plug connectors from the antenna. So we're
just going to plug each of these in one by one.
Okay, once the SMA plugs from the antenna are securely in we're going to power the
unit up. So we're using this 12 volt plug that just plugs into the back of the unit.
So when we plug it in we've got the power light indicator on there. We've got
the little red, which has just turned to blue, which means we've got some signal.
The Wi-Fi indicator there and then these three lights indicate the signal
strength coming in to the boat from the external antenna.
So we're going to do a speed test to see what sort of speeds we can get on narrowboat Silver Fox.
Now first of all i'm going to do a test to see what the cellular signal is like
just from the phone not using the Wi-Fi so just using the cellular data.
So let's do a speed test and see what we get in? As you can see absolutely nothing!
Okay, so now I'm gonna end that test and I'm going to do a speed test but we're
going to connect to narrowboat Silver Fox.
Okay, so let's connect to narrowboat Silver Fox's Wi-Fi. There we go.
Connected. And let's do a speed test for the Wi-Fi from the router and the
external antenna. Okay, off we go. Wow! What a difference! So you can see we've got
zero on the cellular through the phone but just by using the external antenna
wow that is great through the router we get some brilliant download and upload
speeds. There you go, job done!
Now the router is unlocked to any network and
we've done that on purpose. Some of these routers you pick up on contracts and you
stuck to that network, and if you're not happy with the reception there's really
nothing you can do. So we've got a router where we can use any SIM card in it
and that's great for us. So when it comes to SIMs and data plans which one do you go for?
We spoke to quite a lot of people on
Twitter about this because it's not always necessarily the case that the
network that says it's got the widest fastest coverage is actually going to be
the best one for you. If you in a particular place, say a marina, it
might not have great coverage at that particular place even though it
advertises that it's the fastest widest coverage everywhere. So it's good to
check out the coverage where you're going to be. For us, as continuous
cruisers, we do want the best coverage along kind of the canal network and the
towns and cities where we're going to be visiting. So the first thing to do is
shop around. Our mobile contract have been with o2 for years and years.
Probably 10 - 15 years, and we've never (touch wood) had a problem with o2, but
when it came to data only SIMs they weren't actually the worst. They were the
most expensive for the least amount of data, and the other thing is that some
SIMs are only meant to be used in certain phones. This goes back to like
the router contract thing, so what can happen is you can see an 'All-you-can-eat'
data plan and think that's great, £20 pound a month. Put the SIM into your
router and it doesn't work. Why? Because it's only meant for phone plans. So be
very careful if you're buying SIMs and ask and check that it is going to work in
your router for your data plan. And the other thing is really how much data do
you need? There's no point, some of these data
plans could be 300 gigabytes a month. 400, 500 gigabytes a month costing you a
hundred quid a month. Are you really going to use that much? We do use a lot
of data and what we did is we added it up we took an average month and
calculated the amount of data we were going to use. How? On your phone you can
actually reset your data so you can see how much data you using in any given
time period. So we reset it and looked over three months and then took an
average of three months, and we use about 300 gigabytes, it's quite a lot of data a
month. So we know how much data we need so we can get a plan that's going to fit
in our budget. But the thing is is to shop around. Go into shops. Sometimes you
find that you get bargains in the shop that are even better than the prices
that you see online. So go to the shops. Go to all the networks and compare them
and tell them what the other one is offering and you could save yourself a load of money!
If you've got any questions about anything to do with the
Wi-Fi or anything to do with this vlog just drop them down below.
As you know, we try to answer every single comment and question. I've also put links
down there for all the equipment that we're using, so the external antenna and the
router, everything the links are just down there so you can buy those directly
from those links. If you've liked this video or found it informative please
click like. If you disagree with everything anything we said today please
click like. If you don't like us please click like. And also if you want to stay
on top of everything that's going on in regards to the launch of narrowboat
Silver Fox just tick the notifications and YouTube will do the rest, and it's
it's free, it is all free! It only works if you subscribe, so please
subscribe too. Next week we're going to be joined by Kev and Rob, and they're
going to be answering some of your questions about the build of narrowboat
Silver Fox. That's only gonna be chaos. It is isn't it! Looking forward to that. Until
next week we'll see you later. See you later, bye!
(Laughing)
Hello old chap, it's me. (muddles words)
(Laughing)
God! I feel like a right ****!
(laughing) I can't work it out in my head!
Morning! Welcome to narrowboat Silver Fox. You get like this childish excitement every time you say it.
Today (muddles words)
(Swearing)
When it comes to... eugh!
Whats 'Eugh!'?
EUGH!
It's the opposite of 'Eeeee!'
(Laughing)
Yeah, that was fine. (Loud bang)
Dead Mac! (Computer)
Testing testing!
Testing testing
(Loud burp)
More tea vicar?
Are you alright? You're a bit out of breath!
It's running up and down them!
So that's the Wi-Fi. If you've got any comments or questions or anything about everything
with everything everything so everything everything so - Start again!