advocate series lectures // the mifi device

you will learn what a mifi device is, how you use it and when. we will look at one up to date model but most mifi devices work in a similar fashion. i hope to cover

i'll try and explain in as clear english as possible how the mifi device works in operation hopefully without all the jargon that normally goes along with technology.

in this section we will setup a mifi device, we will be using the 4g tp-link lte-advanced m7350 mifi as an example but most are similar in usage.

ok let's get this badboy (or girl) going. luckily mifi devices are often super easy to get setup and often times all you really need to do is charge it up, drop in a sim card, rename the ssid wifi network name, set a new admin password and put it in a high location to get a good signal. this one time step is easy and i'll set through it with you.

192.168.0.1 -- there is no place like home (geeks) will understand.

gonna have a look around the web admin panel (local address) once connected to the wifi network you should be given a local address so you can see this panel. your mifi login may be different to your device, check your instructions that come with your mifi.

hard to get this in one lecture but i'm sure gonna try. always buy an unlocked mifi device so that you can use it anywhere, check how many bands it's has and check that band is supported in the country your going too. sim cards can vary across the board and not all 4g sim cards are the same, same can be said as data packages. if you have your mifi device on you but no sim for that country always ask at the tills in the airport if they carry any data sim cards, do a bit of research before you travel to find out what's a reliable network that people use and why they have that preference.

quick breakdown of what you will be learning in this section, bringing your own internet in the form of your portable dedicated mifi device giving you a wifi signal, things to consider when live video streaming, limitations you might face sharing your connecting, place of the wifi device and potential signal issues, keeping the wifi alive, backup batteries and solar panels, super twitter SSID life hack for getting noticed at conferences and finally security good practice with mifi passwords.

let's be honest, on a scale from one to ten how often has the wifi totally sucked at a conference. slow speeds, dropouts, issues with portal pages. horrible. annoying, slows you down, lifeline cut off. time to switch back to drinking. AM I RIGHT? - bringing your own little part of the internet in your pocket will, i promise be the single most awesome thing you do for yourself in terms of being connected while others struggle to get a tweet out.

video streaming, latency, dropping frames and keeping an awesome stream going at a busy conference with lots of other iphones trying to use the same network/wifi can be hard. having multiple sim card providers that are not popular but work at the venue in question is a good way of making sure you can stream. news crews often have a dedicated provider of satellite outside in a van and brought into the venue for key people to use. now you can do the same to a certain degree.

sure your connection should be able to allow 15 people on but i probably would'nt try it. lots of video applications are very bandwidth intensive and you'll soon find a 4g lte connection die under the load of a few users doing so. if your in a group of people just doing status updates on twitter and facebook then chances are you will be good to go. remember the killers of mifi devices are power, heat and eating up all that 4g bandwidth.

where the mifi device is placed can be crucial for your signal strength and getting a decent 3g/4g cellular connection to the web. on the odd occasion that you have placed it in the wrong place you can find that your internet can drop from 4g to 3g and not try to get back to 4g - have backup sim cards to jump too are crucial as well.

a cool little hack (kinda) i like to do on a mifi device (even when i'm not using it for internet) is to rename the wifi name to be my twitter name (@philcampbell) that way when people are nearby to me in a conference or bar or pub they can see my wifi name if they go searching for an open wifi and know that i'm nearby, i've even had people tweet me asking for my wifi password! - a good way to start a conversation at a networking event.

having a password on your mifi that is not easy to crack is crucial for you not to run out of data or bandwidth quickly. always lock it down, change it regularly and if your giving it out remember that people can get on that device whenever you power it up. try and change every event. it only takes a few minutes in the admin panel to do.

data and roaming are super expensive and often a crappy experience. squash that by getting local sims that will work with your unlocked mifi device to the country that your heading too. it can be difficult to get unlimited data plan so double and triple check you are really getting unlimited data. some places are better than others. please let us know about your experiences!

do not buy anything locked to any network. ever. most devices can be bought from amazon and other places with the same chipset as your network providers branded ones but unlocked to any network making moving sim providers easy. if your a data hog like me doing this prove an easy transition when you want to swap.

seems a crazy compromise but i've been in this situation before. do i use super fast 4g access but limited by a bandwidth cap or unlimited 3g data for thirty days. i run a number of sims and have found very often that the 3g internet is perfectly acceptable for low bandwidth hungry applications like twitter, vine and instagram meaning that you don't have to worry about bandwidth quotas and post as much as you like. my 4g experience has often been better for when i really needed to get something on youtube or stream live video to the web. use them wisely, and always check the quotas.

team humble is a collective that met on blab - a video chat site that allows four people at once to video chat. it's been a really humbling experience to find people in six weeks that were like minded and wanted to work together on projects as a bunch of rag tag creatives. we are an empowerment engine with the intention of helping each get to where each other needs to go.

i'll be releasing a number of small courses like this regarding blocks of hardware - cameras, audio, web applications and other things that a brand advocate uses on their travels so you can truly get to know the equipment and services that we tend to use when media making.

purchasing this course has a profound effect on the instructor. it has taken me well over a year of planning and curation to finally put these course together and every bit of money for the course goes into bringing my dreams together of building apiary haus. a space for fabrication by creators both adult and children. you can be sure that any courses bought on udemy that the funds are put into projects that empower others.