A good Internet connection on the road is almost as important to us as diesel for the tank. In addition to our cell phones, we also have our notebooks with us on the road so that we can work from anywhere.
There are various ways to connect to the Internet via your notebook when you are on the move. The simplest is certainly to create a hotspot with your cell phone and use the notebook via this. However, this is only an absolute emergency solution for us, as it uses up a lot of cell phone battery. Sure, you can charge it in parallel, but that makes the whole thing impractical again. Constantly plugging a cable into the phone to be able to work would simply be annoying. The speed is sometimes not the fastest and, depending on the contract, the data volume can be used up pretty quickly.
Mobile router
The most logical option is a mobile router! This is exactly what we can only recommend. Here, too, there are two options for the Grand California. The first, Volkswagen offers a factory-installed router for an incredible 800 euros, not only incredibly expensive but also incredibly impractical, because the router is permanently connected to the vehicle and can therefore only be used in the car. We didn’t order the router from the factory for exactly the two reasons, but opted for the second option, a mobile router that we can take with us everywhere. Here the choice on the market is huge.
After some research and experience with routers at home, we decided on a Netgear Nighthawk. The Netgear is priced around 300 Euros, which is certainly not a small amount of money, but definitely worth the price. Some technical requirements were important, the router should be able to be used by battery and use the WLan standard 5GHz (dual-band 802.11 ac/n/g/b/a). This ensures fast WiFi speed even when several devices are connected to the router. The 4G standard is mandatory, and the Netgear delivers transmission speeds of 1 GBit/s in download and 150 MBit/s in upload. Mobile routers are available with 4G and / or 5G standard, as a normal user there should be almost no use case for a 5G connection, alone the price premium of 400 euros does not justify it. The Netgear Nighthawk can be connected to an external antenna if the cell phone signal is too weak.
The router is available -> HERE < –
That was quite technical, but we had to go into it a little. Routers are available from many manufacturers, so no matter which model you end up choosing, it’s better not to go for the built-in one from Volkswagen. The price alone is unjustified, not to mention the configuration options.
We use our Cali Lan for work, uploading pictures, blogging and streaming TV. With the last point, we have also saved ourselves the SAT dish on the roof 😊. If you have a built-in TV, you can use a Fire TV Stick, for example, and don’t have to miss out on any program or show. At 30 euros, the Fire TV Stick is not really expensive and easily beats the satellite system, which costs 2800 euros.
Sim card
The router alone, whether ex works or mobile, is of course not enough to enjoy mobile Internet. A SIM card with a corresponding contract / prepaid offer is required. This is where the biggest critics of TV streaming come in and say “a contract with a corresponding data volume costs a lot”. Yes, that is correct! If you want to use the Internet for streaming, there is no getting around an unlimited contract. For us personally, there are only two providers that come into question here: Telekom or Vodafone. As mentioned above, we use the Internet for work and the network coverage / speeds provided by O2 are simply not sufficient here. In rural areas, things aren’t really good in Germany anyway and with O2 it quickly becomes a complete disaster.
As we have a Telekom Internet connection at home, the combination of mobile and fixed network was the obvious choice. Both Telekom and Vodafone offer customers special discounts when they combine the two. For example, we pay for our landline, 2 cell phones incl. Multisims and a data card for our Cali router 120 euros per month. That’s still a lot of money, but the data cards alone cost 15 euros per month, which is great.
Telekom’s network coverage is quite good in Germany, but unfortunately there are still white spots, especially in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. However, the speed is usually sufficient to play back an HD stream.
Conclusion
A mobile router and an unlimited tariff turn the Grand California into a mobile office and TV streaming base. Save yourself the router and the SAT system ex works, in total a good 3600 euros, for which you can book an appropriate tariff and work, listen to music or simply watch TV for a long time.
