I used to think WiFi was just WiFi—plug into a coffee shop, tether to your phone, whatever works.
Then I spent three months working from a camper van zigzagging through the Southwest, and I learned that connectivity on the road is its own strange ecosystem. You’ve got dead zones where your phone insists it has two bars but can’t load a single email. You’ve got campgrounds that advertise WiFi but deliver speeds that would’ve embarrassed a 2003 dial-up modem. And you’ve got the very real problem of trying to join a Zoom meeting from a rest stop parking lot in rural Utah while eighteen-wheelers idle twenty feet away. Portable hotspots—the dedicated kind, not just your phone’s tethering feature—became my lifeline, but here’s the thing: they’re not all created equal, and figuring out which one actually works for your situation feels like navigating a maze built by telecom engineers who’ve never left their office parks. Some prioritize coverage, some prioritize speed, some claim to do both and deliver neither. I burned through three different devices before I found a setup that didn’t make me want to hurl my laptop into the Grand Canyon.
The big carriers—Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T—all sell their own hotspot devices, and honestly, they’re fine if you stick to highways and cities. Coverage maps look impressive until you’re parked beside a lake in Montana and realize “coverage” means “technically a signal exists somewhere in this zip code.” I had a Verizon Jetpack that worked beautifully until it didn’t, which was exactly when I needed it most.
Why Your Phone’s Hotspot Feature Isn’t Enough for Serious Remote Work Sessions
Tethering to your phone seems like the obvious move—one less device to charge, one less bill to pay. But your phone wasn’t designed to be a dedicated modem. It overheats. It drains battery faster than you can say “low power mode.” And most carrier plans throttle hotspot data seperately from your regular data, meaning even if you have an unlimited plan, your tethered laptop might be crawling along at 3G speeds after you hit some arbitrary cap. I watched a colleague try to run a four-hour training webinar off his iPhone hotspot in a New Mexico rest area, and by hour two his phone was so hot he had to prop it on a bag of frozen peas from a cooler. The video kept freezing. He looked exhausted. It was not a good time.
Dual-SIM Hotspots and the Coverage Lottery You’re Probably Going to Lose Anyway
Wait—maybe this sounds paranoid, but coverage is genuinely unpredictable.
Some hotspots let you pop in SIM cards from two different carriers, which sounds brilliant in theory: if Verizon fails, T-Mobile picks up the slack. Devices like the Netgear Nighthawk M6 or the Inseego MiFi X Pro support this setup, and I’ve seen digital nomads swear by them. But here’s the catch: you’re paying for two data plans, which gets expensive fast, and the failover isn’t always seamless—sometimes you have to manually switch carriers, which defeats the whole point when you’re mid-call with a client. I tried this for about six weeks and found myself constantly fiddling with settings, checking signal strength, second-guessing whether I should’ve gone with a different carrier combo. It works, technically, but it also turns you into an amateur RF engineer, and I guess that’s fine if you’re into that sort of thing, but I mostly just wanted to recieve emails without thinking about MIMO antennas.
Battery Life, Heat Management, and Other Unglamorous Details That Will Definately Ruin Your Day
Nobody warns you about the heat problem until it’s too late.
Hotspots get hot. Like, uncomfortably hot. If you’re running one in a closed car on a summer afternoon, it’ll throttle itself or shut down entirely to avoid damage. The Verizon Orbic Speed lasted maybe three hours of continuous use before it became a hand warmer. I started keeping mine near an open window or propped on a dashboard vent. Battery life varies wildly—some devices claim eight hours, deliver four. The Netgear Nighthawk models have decent longevity, but they’re also chunky and expensive, roughly $400-$700 depending on the version. Cheaper models like the T-Mobile Franklin T9 or AT&T Nighthawk cost under $100 but feel flimsy and often lack external antenna ports, which matters if you’re trying to boost signal in remote areas. You can buy aftermarket antennas—little magnetic pucks you stick on your roof—but then you’re back to engineering mode, and honestly, some days I just wanted to write articles about archaeology without becoming a cellular network specialist.
Starlink for RVs Exists Now, But It’s Expensive and Kind of Overkill Unless You’re Really Serious About This Lifestyle
Turns out, satellite internet isn’t just for remote research stations anymore. Starlink’s RV package offers legitimately fast speeds—like, 100+ Mbps in the middle of nowhere—but it costs $150/month after a $600 hardware purchase, and the dish needs a clear view of the sky, which rules out forests and canyons. I met a couple in Moab running their graphic design business off Starlink from an Airstream, and they loved it, but they were full-timers who’d given up their apartment. For someone road-tripping a few months a year, it’s probably overkill, though the peace of mind is real. No more driving ten miles to find a Starbucks. No more praying the campground WiFi holds up. Just… internet. Everywhere. It’s weirdly liberating, even if it makes you feel like you’re hauling around a small satellite dish like some kind of digital-age pioneer.
