TravelTalkOnline Forums Travel and Vacation Forums British Virgin Islands Team and Zoom video calls.

We are heading to BVI in May. Curious to hear if people recently there have experience with Teams and Zoom calls. Is the internet bandwidth capable? We are on a Moorings boat.

If it's important maybe rent a report 4G router for the trip. We were given one when the boat wifi didn't work and it was quite a bit faster. Also, our boat wifi does not work in Anegada but I believe report did. A downside is that the power adapters (2) require 120V, we needed an inverter and a power strip to keep it running without running the genset.

All the boat WiFi systems in the BVI work through the cellular network including renport. Speed is mostly a function of the number of users. Crowded anchorages you will see the WiFi work much slower especially in the 7 to 10 am and 6 to 10 pm time frames. You might have zero issues streaming at one anchorage midday and a very different experience at another anchorage the next day.
G

Thanks for asking! I am land based on Tortola in May and this would be good to know since I will be working a few days and we use Teams heavily.

I worked remotely from our boat in January and was on zoom calls almost daily. I found the onboard wifi to be pretty good in most spots, with the exception of Peter Island and Trellis Bay. We ended up spending a few days at Scrub Island because the wifi was excellent there. I was also able to set up a hotspot using my AT&T signal from Norman and Jost.

I would caution that there were times when my calls would unexpectedly drop, my video would freeze or my audio would struggle to keep up. When using a hotspot, this would happen even if I had good cell service.

Amy

Check out the Speedify app. I use it to bond multiple Internet connections and for failover. I run a tethered phone, connect to a router via my wifi connection, and connect to a hotspot with a USB wifi adapter. Zoom works very well. Teams works as well as the software with frequent crashes. This is key for working in Coral Bay STJ with iffy wireless coverage; if the winds moves north I lose my AT&T connection from Bordeaux Mountain.

Cheers, RickG

Hi There - was down in Feb. Verizon and used boat WIFI - Norman was problematic and Anegada was no go - everywhere else was fine (fortunately and unfortunately)

Just finished a zoom yoga session this morning from Mahoe Bay - land based

They do not all use the same networks nor do they use the same protocols. Trust me, the Renport is different.

Better different? This time Moorings built in the cost of wifi and I want to make sure it is top notch

I always got the Renport with upgrade which was excellent

Glad to hear your Anegada trip report

The new Renport routers are GIGABIT 4G LTE routers.

Our boat is a 2020 and just went from exclusive plus to exclusive. Wifi continues to be included. I looked at the hardware in the boat but couldn't find much information on it. It's by a company called t4s. In my experience the Renport unit is much faster and has a better coverage area. I got good coverage in Anegade with Renport and none at all with the boat WiFi.

When our built in WiFi wasn't working and we were given the Renport unit the base staff (not Renport) also opined that it was a significant upgrade.

I may contact Renport myself to understand the distinction.

Let me know if you find out anything from Renport. Besides having better equipment, it could be that their router is tapped into different, or multiple, broadband providers. We have a charter in early July and need to have confidence in Internet availability. In our 2018 trip, it was pretty sketchy at Anegada so if Renport's equipment does a better job up there, I'll probably rent one.

The cellular routers on the charter boats will be dependent on which carrier they connect to. At Pomato point in Anegada this weekend I was getting 6mbps on a router connected to CCT and 25+mbps on a Digicel router.

Do we have any way to control this? Our boat router would not connect to the internet period.

I ran a speedtest at great harbor at six AM and got 6Mbps down and 2 up fwiw.

Probably not. The routers will probably only pick up the carrier they came from. I happened to have 2 routers with me.

Thanks. Certainly confirmation that there are large differences in the performance of these routers and the onboard Moorings units do not appear to be at the top of the heap.

We had great internet everywhere except Anegada in March. Our boat is in the TMM fleet - they TMM equipped her with a Huawei 4G router. I was able to do ZOOM calls consistently M-F - sometimes 4 a day. The Skyroam we brought worked sporadically. The Renport is intriguing.

I wish I would have started this at the beginning, but I ran another speedtest in Pirate's Bight at 5:30AM on the Moorings:

21Mbps down, 3.7Mbps up

In situations like this, people make serious decisions about it. To leave or wait until everything sets up. It's a 50/50 case, and it depends on you. I'd suggest waiting, but at the same time looking for a better possible option. If it's that bad, you could search for an office job at least. I don't think that government would help. Anyway, if you find a new job and zoom it's terrible, you can check this meeting platform. Worked once on it, nothing to say. But it is straightforward to work with it.

I had decent speed and good coverage with the standard Moorings WiFi everywhere except Anegada in June and July. I tried using a T mobile international plan as a backup in Anegada and also had limited success but it was better than the Moorings.
G

I used a Digicel Mi-Fi router and data plan this last trip for my internet with lots of TEAMS video calls with lots of people (read - lots of video movement) and it worked out really well.

We just got back from 12 days on the boat. We used Renport for the first time and it won’t be the last. Had no issues streaming multiple devices at once. I also VPN on work computer and it was pretty fast. Thumbs up for Renoort....and the data was unlimited.

I'll second the Renport recommendation. It gave us a strong signal everywhere, including Anegada. We were even able to watch video streams on the boat's smart tv (through a US based VPN). Not cheap, especially compared to the free Moorings WiFi on our boat, but the speed and unlimited data made it worth the price.

Third that - the new Renport routers run circles around the boat WiFi.
But make sure you have an inverter with 2 outlets.