487 – Up your speed and security when on the road: Tom talks Portable WiFi

Episode 487 – Portable Wi-Fi
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode four hundred and eighty seven to screw the Commute podcast. We're at Labor Day Monday, Labor Day. And since it's Labor Day, I thought, you know what, I'm going to give people something that's going to make their labor easier and faster. So that's what we're going to talk about today, portable Wi-Fi. Now, you know, this is not a tech show. All right. I'm not Kim Komando, but anything that I can tell you that will speed up your work means there's more time for marketing or leisure, whatever lifestyle stuff you want to do. So today I'm going to tell you about a tool I've used for years that only getting better and faster. All right. Hope you did miss episode 486. That was Travis Johnson. This is part of Vett Proner month. And listen to this. Both his mother and sister literally tried to kill him. So he's turned it all around. And now he helps nonprofit organizations that helped him as a child. Very inspiring and insightful. If you ever even if you ever thought about starting a nonprofit. Now, affiliates, how'd you like to make big bucks? Referring my products and services as well. Email me at Tom@screwthecommute.com. We'll give you all the details of how you can make up to five thousand dollars.

[00:01:50] Could be even more for referrals. And that's for one referral. That's not for hundreds and hundreds of them. All right. Although we have everything from eight dollars and fifty cents to in excess of 5000 bucks, and we'd love to send you the money. So check that out. Now pick up a copy of our automation ebook. It's something that you just got to do, folks. I mean, I'm telling you to your face, although I can't see you. Right. You're crazy. You're crazy if you don't do what I tell you in this book. You're just wasting time. You're just running your fingers on your keyboard for no reason. Check it out and grab your free copy. We charge 27 bucks for this, it's at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. While you're at it, pick up a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app. We have videos and screen captures that teach you how to use it. And you can take us with you on the road. All right, we're still going strong in our program or pilot program to help persons with disabilities. My school is giving scholarships for scholarships. They don't have to spend a nickel to go through the school. Now, if they want to start their own business, they're going to have to buy hosting, you know, website and all that stuff.

[00:03:17] But they'll be able to do it for pennies on the dollar compared to not knowing what you're doing. So the pilot program is designed to get five persons with disabilities either hired in good paying jobs or started their own business or both. And then when I prove the concept, then I'm going to roll it out really big and go for big money from foundations and corporations and grants to help lots of people with disabilities. So so that's my project and I really love your help on it. We're actually going to use some of the money from our Go Fund Me campaign to hire people with disabilities to help run the program. So check it out at IMTCVA.org/disabilities. Click on the Go Fund Me campaign. You can see how people are doing. We have three people in the program now and they're starting to give video updates. And you want to talk about inspiring. The first guy that gave a video update couldn't even see the camera. He's legally blind. All right. So so when you cry the blues out there of how you're having trouble making money online. I don't want to hear it. So so check it out. Help these people out and it'll be really something you can be proud of.

[00:04:40] All right, let's get to the main event. We'll talk about portable Wi-Fi and they're sometimes called travel routers. I want to tell you what it can mean for your business now. If you only work your business while sitting home and you have a solid Internet connection, then this episode would only apply to you if you travel once in a while and are always frustrated with poor and insecure hotel Wi-Fi or if you enjoy sitting at a coffee shop working on your tablet or laptop. So see, if you do go out of your house to work or do anything on a portable device, what I'm going to talk about today, well, not only speed you up, it'll keep your online activities. Way, way, way safer. Now, let me be clear, this is not free Wi-Fi. It's converting whatever cell phone plan you have to Wi-Fi. And I'll save you lots of money. All right, so let's talk about some scenarios. Now, where I use my portable Wi-Fi, my notes on this said my portable wife. I know spell check my notes. I'm portable wife. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I use I use her when I'm in a hotel. The portable. Oh, I got to amuse myself, OK, so I'm here by myself with just the dogs and they never tell me jokes or anything. They are funny, though, so. So where I use my portable Wi-Fi the most is when I'm in a hotel. See, many of you that have seen me at big events know that I sit in the back of the room for every single speaker, and I'm on my laptop working the entire time.

[00:06:37] The problem is that in the meeting rooms, the Wi-Fi is either way worse than the sleeping rooms or it's not there at all because the hotel was going to charge the promoter eleven hundred dollars or something to turn it on. Now, that's another reason you see other speakers in the room sitting close to me, not because they revere me so much. They want to be close to me so that my aura rubs off on them. It's it's because they know I have portable Wi-Fi and they give and I give them the password to log on to my device. Now, I'm a fanatic to keep working fast and furious just about wherever I am. So having my portable Wi-Fi can keep me working for maybe three days of productivity at that event where without it, I'd be stuck. All right, let's take those same three days and jump up to my sleeping room. Yeah, most hotels have Wi-Fi and it's usually the most pitiful on the face of the earth. The first thing I do when I set up my laptop in my sleeping room is to do a speed test with the hotel Wi-Fi. Then I do one with my portable Wi-Fi. If in the rare occasion the hotel was faster, I use it. Normally it just confirms how bad the hotel Wi-Fi is, and I use my portable Wi-Fi to get much faster speed.

[00:08:10] The other important issue is security. Whether I use the hotel Wi-Fi or my own, I still use a VPN. That's a virtual private network. Without a VPN, the hotel system can easily see everything you're doing, and and even a semiskilled hacker can cause a whole lot of damage to you and others in the hotel. I don't want anything to do with that, so I go through a VPN now they're cheap, but they do normally slow down speeds, which is counterproductive to what I'm talking about today, right? Well, not really, because I want to start out with the highest speed I can, knowing that my VPN is going to slow me down some. So it's worth it because now all your stuff and surfing is encrypted and hidden from potential prying eyes. All right, let's take another scenario. I'm driving between cities and I pull off at a rest stop to take care of something that's urgent. Well, I don't want to use the Wi-Fi at the rest stop or or they don't even have any at all. Most of the time. So I fire up my portable Wi-Fi tied to my cell signal, which is fine, and I get my Internet connection. I take care of business and I'm back on the road. Well, you might say, but the Tom. Where did you plug in the device? Well, I didn't. It's also got its own battery that lasts for many hours, so I didn't have to plug it in for that quick stop.

[00:09:48] The other thing, you might be camping or backpacking, you need to get some work done or a file sent to someone. Grab your portable Wi-Fi, bam, wham, you're enjoying your lifestyle business where you can be backpacking or camping and still doing the things that keep the money coming in. Now, many of these mobile routers are what are called unlocked, which means they can take SIM cards from different services. Now, this is really handy, especially if you travel overseas and don't want to pay enormous data rates. Just make sure you check and read lots of reviews on the one you want to buy before you buy it, to make sure it suits the way you plan on using it. Now, I've got a couple of links here in the show notes with reviews and stuff like that and more info on picking a portable router. Her travel router. Anyway, once you get one of those things, you're going to be using it more than you ever dreamed. Ok, let's talk about what to look for when getting a portable Wi-Fi. Now, these are things, and they're not in no particular order. And again, some are going to be more important to you based on how you plan on using it. So the first thing is it locked or unlocked if it's locked? You're stuck with one particular service, if it's unlocked. Then you can put in SIM cards wherever you happen to be.

[00:11:15] The battery life. Will it last long enough for your intended use? And while we're on the topic of batteries, can you use extra batteries with it? Many of these things have a USB port. So that you can run it off of your laptop if you had to. And some will let you charge your cell phone like the other direction if it's dying, using the battery in the portable Wi-Fi. It says life again, here I use I use the battery in my portable wife. All right. Oh, man, I'm getting silly today, huh? All right. Some of them have this VPN now. I I'm not sure if it's a paid extra for the VPN that this one of these would be capable of including. But you do not. I think I did something on VPN not too long ago. You do want to use a paid VPN. You don't want to use a freebie because they have to pay the bill somewhere, which is probably by selling your data. But anyway, you might want to check that out. Now, does it have an app so you can control it from your portable device? That could be handy for you. How many devices will it handle at one time? Usually there are about 10. But you can get ones that'll handle way more. In other words, they're more expensive and they just have more power. The speed of it, you can get anywhere from 3G, which is a little bit old style, to 4G, to 4G plus to 5G.

[00:12:56] And even gigabit speeds now, if it's just you. Probably a cheaper, slower device is fine. It's still going to be faster than most places that you're at. If it needs to support a family road trip with people streaming Netflix in the back seat, well, you're going to have to up your game and and and the cost of it and get a faster one. Another thing is single or dual band, a lot of people, even in their home ratters, don't understand this concept. So 5G is going to be faster, but 2.4 GHz Gives you more range. So you have to say, well, what you know is that important to me? Am I willing to pay extra for that or do I just want the speed and I'm sitting right next to it in a hotel room? Or am I traveling around and and want to use it as I'm doing a little hiking away from my tent, you know, and then you might want 2.4 GHz or both. So it's going to cost you more for both. So if there's interest, you think about how you would use it and then read lots of reviews about which one might be best for you. And like I said, I've got links in the show notes to give you reviews as ever the time of this recording. You know, there's a tool in Google where it's sometimes under more tools, sometimes it's just available.

[00:14:21] That tells you how old an article is. Do you want an article within the past week or the past month? So I try to find the latest ones when I'm looking for a review, because I might find a review that was put in a year ago on on some piece of tech. And you know how fast tech moves. So. So use that when you're doing a search on Google for reviews. But this one, I did that on some of the articles I put in here for you. So they're pretty current. All right. So please don't forget about my friends that have disabilities and we're trying to get them educated and get them good paying jobs. And, you know, the skill that they're learning is a super high demand. Every business on Earth needs shopping carts and email marketing and chat bots and all the other blogging and product production and everything we teach in the school. It's not any kind of like highfalutin e-commerce where they're just crunching numbers all day long. Yeah, there's numbers involved, but there's still it's the hands on nitty gritty nuts and bolts, things that I do every day to pull money in online. That's what we're teaching them. And every business on earth needs it. All right. So that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Happy Labor Day. And we'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.

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