FAQs and Support

No, Wave WiFi provides products to help you connect further than you otherwise would, using Cellular and WiFi technologies. We help you connect to Public WiFi Hotspots and Cellular Towers (with a Sim Card and Service from a Cellular Carrier/Provider). We don’t provide the actual Internet Service; we just help you connect to it and share that onto an Onboard Network of wired and wireless devices.

Internet from Cellular and WiFi can vary based on the service provided. We tend to say, “You are only as good as What you are Connected to.” With Cellular, we are capable of up to LTE-Advanced. Speeds published for LTE-A (and WiFi, for that matter) are Theoretical Max. You rarely get Theoretical Max. Our WiFi products have different WiFi technology levels. Rogue Wave products go up to 802.11n (WiFi 4), and Professional Series products go up to 802.11ac (WiFi 5). A marina or other Hotspot will not give you their full bandwidth/speed; whatever that speed is, it’s a shared system. WiFi and Router hops – it is all about division. Every router and WiFi hop loses some speed. More devices connecting to an internal wireless network will cause sharing/division of available bandwidth/speed. Our products don’t limit speed, in general, so if you have an issue with the speed, you may want to contact us for support. There is not an exact number for a given connection. Our products can handle speeds surpassing what you will be provided by most Internet connections. But like we have been saying, your marina probably will not give you the speed our products offer.

Our products are not locked to a particular cellular provider (carrier). You need a 2FF (Form Factor) Sim Card (usually given on a 1FF credit card sized card.) already activated, data only, no E911 services on it. You are free to choose your carrier. We are not a cell service provider; we are just providing the equipment to help you connect to Cellular 3G – 4G further than you otherwise could and share that to multiple users’ devices onboard.

No, Wave WiFi provides products to help you connect further than you otherwise would, using Cellular and WiFi technologies. We help you connect to Public WiFi Hotspots and Cellular Towers (with a Sim Card and Service from a Cellular Carrier/Provider). We don’t provide the actual Internet Service; we just help you connect to it and share that onto an Onboard Network of wired and wireless devices.

Our products are not locked to a particular cellular provider (carrier). You need a 2FF (Form Factor) Sim Card (usually given on a 1FF credit card sized card.) already activated, data only, no E911 services on it. You are free to choose your carrier. We are not a cell service provider; we are just providing the equipment to help you connect to Cellular 3G – 4G further than you otherwise could and share that to multiple users’ devices onboard.

No, Wave WiFi provides products to help you connect further than you otherwise would, using Cellular and WiFi technologies. We help you connect to Public WiFi Hotspots and Cellular Towers (with a Sim Card and Service from a Cellular Carrier/Provider). We don’t provide the actual Internet Service; we just help you connect to it and share that onto an Onboard Network of wired and wireless devices.

In general, you can leave the product(s) ON all the time; however, keep in mind that prolonged use could drain the battery if connected to DC 12-Volt power (boat or RV battery). 

No, you would not connect to your wireless router. That would make a circle – looping you back to your network, without any Internet access, and causing other networking problems. Newer Wave WiFi products, the firmware, has a feature allowing you to “Ignore” such access points and routers – to take them off the scan page and prevent you from attempting to connect to them.

You are generally looking for Public WiFi. The only exceptions will be if you know what you are connecting to – such as someone else’s boat that has allowed you or a Personal Hotspot that you own. You would not connect to your boat name and should not connect to things that are not public. Connecting to someone’s HP Printer would not get you Internet access.

Internet from Cellular and WiFi can vary based on the service provided. We tend to say, “You are only as good as What you are Connected to.” With Cellular, we are capable of up to LTE-Advanced. Speeds published for LTE-A (and WiFi, for that matter) are Theoretical Max. You rarely get Theoretical Max. Our WiFi products have different WiFi technology levels. Rogue Wave products go up to 802.11n (WiFi 4), and Professional Series products go up to 802.11ac (WiFi 5). A marina or other Hotspot will not give you their full bandwidth/speed; whatever that speed is, it’s a shared system. WiFi and Router hops – it is all about division. Every router and WiFi hop loses some speed. More devices connecting to an internal wireless network will cause sharing/division of available bandwidth/speed. Our products don’t limit speed, in general, so if you have an issue with the speed, you may want to contact us for support. There is not an exact number for a given connection. Our products can handle speeds surpassing what you will be provided by most Internet connections. But like we have been saying, your marina probably will not give you the speed our products offer.

Our WiFi Receiver systems are intuitive and straightforward while providing the information and features that our customers need. You start on the main page, the Scan Page. This page tells you how many WiFi signals (networks) it is finding.

There is a menu along the left side of the page (on smaller devices such as phones, there is a Hamburger Stack [collapsed menu] in the upper left that you can tap on to drop down the menu). A lot of features and settings are accessible from this menu.

The Scan Page seeks and presents available WiFi Hotspots that you can connect to. You will notice that they indicate Name (SSID), Whether they are “locked” or “unlocked” (WPA2 secured or not), Channel (or x Aps [+], and Signal Strength both in a color graph form and in dBm.

You click in the middle of the rectangle of your chosen Hotspot and click the “Connect” button to connect to it. It should go through “Checking IP” followed by – hopefully 3 “YES” for Connected to Network, Got IP, Got Internet. You should be online at that point. In the upper right of the page, you will see an indication in the green of a checkmark and the name of the Internet provider you just connected to. You will also see a yellow half-circle with a star and a green half-circle with a checkmark, indicating that you are connected to the Internet.

It is also possible to get something called “Captive Portal”. Internet: orange checkmark, which means that the Hotspot requires further sign-on to gain Internet access.

If you are attempting to connect to a Marina (Public) Hotspot and you get:

Connected to network: YES

IP obtained: YES

Internet detected: NO

But you don’t get a Captive Portal indication. Check on the Settings page to see if STATIC IP got turned on. Using a STATIC IP can cause connectivity problems. We want new current IP settings, by DHCP, from the current Hotspot. Otherwise, the connection gets broken. We can’t get to the Internet FROM an IP that is not valid for this Hotspot.

Turn that toggle switch back to OFF, click the “Change Settings” button, and then recheck the Current Connection information. I should populate with settings obtained from the Hotspot. Check on the Scan page if it now indicates connected. You might have to disconnect and re-connect again. But you should get connected and online.

A captive portal is a web page displayed to newly connected users of a WiFi network. It requires some sort of interaction before granting access to network resources. In other words – if you want to connect to a network that runs that, you need to go through a captive portal first.

Captive portals present a landing or log-in page, which may require credentials or other agreements acknowledged to gain Internet access.

Wave WiFi receivers usually detect Captive Portal and display means to open the required page. If that doesn’t work, you might have to get creative to force that page to appear.

1. You can try just opening another tab in your browser and try to go to any web page. That might kick off the Captive Portal web page.
2. Try looking in the Settings page, in your Wave WiFi receiver, for “Current Connection:” and within that find “Gateway:”. Open a new tab and try to go to http://, where gateway ip is that IP next to Gateway.
3. Try making sure any HTTPS tabs/pages are closed. Close your email program or any other Internet using software as they might use HTTPS type connections. Try opening an “HTTP://” website. (This might be hard to do these days as even Google and Yahoo re-direct you to HTTPS for their websites.) Try this one: http://neverssl.com/ – it is meant for this purpose.
4. Contact Marina Office and ask if there is a specific sign-on URL (web address) that you can use to sign in.
5. Check your browser settings for things that prevent re-directs or pop-ups from being displayed.

Note: On some systems that are accessed remotely over the Internet, port forwarding is not needed. They make an outbound connection to “The Cloud” – to servers of their manufacturer, and by doing so, allow the incoming connection. Usually, incoming connections cannot pass the NAT boundary between Public IP and Private IP. Routers do not know which computer or device should receive traffic. Thus, Port Forwarding.

Our Router products already have Port Forwarding in: Settings > Port Forwarding. 

Note: Description is whatever you want to call it. Ports: Public is the port(s) accessed from the Internet (outside the boat). Ports: Private is the port or ports range (inside the boat) (usually the same as Public) of your device or system needing remote access. The protocol is the TCP/IP protocol (TCP, UDP, or BOTH). IP: is the inside IP Address of your device or system needing remote access. Usually, the IP is 192.168.101.X or 192.168.105.X depending on whether this device is on Router Ethernet Port #1 (blue port, aka Main LAN) or Port #5 (far left yellow port, aka Guest LAN). The AP – WiFi Access Point of the Router is configured (in Local APs) linked to Router Ethernet Port #1. So, a device on WiFi would be forwarded to as if it were on Ethernet Port #1. It is possible to Port Forward from a WiFi Receiver to the router and then forward to your device or system. We have an instruction document on how to do this.

Our products are not locked to a particular cellular provider (carrier). You need a 2FF (Form Factor) Sim Card (usually given on a 1FF credit card sized card.) already activated, data only, no E911 services on it. You are free to choose your carrier. We are not a cell service provider; we are just providing the equipment to help you connect to Cellular 3G – 4G further than you otherwise could and share that to multiple users’ devices onboard.

No, you would not connect to your wireless router. That would make a circle – looping you back to your network, without any Internet access, and causing other networking problems. Newer Wave WiFi products, the firmware, has a feature allowing you to “Ignore” such access points and routers – to take them off the scan page and prevent you from attempting to connect to them.

You are generally looking for Public WiFi. The only exceptions will be if you know what you are connecting to – such as someone else’s boat that has allowed you or a Personal Hotspot that you own. You would not connect to your boat name and should not connect to things that are not public. Connecting to someone’s HP Printer would not get you Internet access.

Our WiFi Receiver systems are intuitive and straightforward while providing the information and features that our customers need. You start on the main page, the Scan Page. This page tells you how many WiFi signals (networks) it is finding.

There is a menu along the left side of the page (on smaller devices such as phones, there is a Hamburger Stack [collapsed menu] in the upper left that you can tap on to drop down the menu). A lot of features and settings are accessible from this menu.

The Scan Page seeks and presents available WiFi Hotspots that you can connect to. You will notice that they indicate Name (SSID), Whether they are “locked” or “unlocked” (WPA2 secured or not), Channel (or x Aps [+], and Signal Strength both in a color graph form and in dBm.

You click in the middle of the rectangle of your chosen Hotspot and click the “Connect” button to connect to it. It should go through “Checking IP” followed by – hopefully 3 “YES” for Connected to Network, Got IP, Got Internet. You should be online at that point. In the upper right of the page, you will see an indication in the green of a checkmark and the name of the Internet provider you just connected to. You will also see a yellow half-circle with a star and a green half-circle with a checkmark, indicating that you are connected to the Internet.

It is also possible to get something called “Captive Portal”. Internet: orange checkmark, which means that the Hotspot requires further sign-on to gain Internet access.

Our products are not locked to a particular cellular provider (carrier). You need a 2FF (Form Factor) Sim Card (usually given on a 1FF credit card sized card.) already activated, data only, no E911 services on it. You are free to choose your carrier. We are not a cell service provider; we are just providing the equipment to help you connect to Cellular 3G – 4G further than you otherwise could and share that to multiple users’ devices onboard.

In general, you can leave the product(s) ON all the time; however, keep in mind that prolonged use could drain the battery if connected to DC 12-Volt power (boat or RV battery). 

No, you would not connect to your wireless router. That would make a circle – looping you back to your network, without any Internet access, and causing other networking problems. Newer Wave WiFi products, the firmware, has a feature allowing you to “Ignore” such access points and routers – to take them off the scan page and prevent you from attempting to connect to them.

You are generally looking for Public WiFi. The only exceptions will be if you know what you are connecting to – such as someone else’s boat that has allowed you or a Personal Hotspot that you own. You would not connect to your boat name and should not connect to things that are not public. Connecting to someone’s HP Printer would not get you Internet access.

If you are attempting to connect to a Marina (Public) Hotspot and you get:

Connected to network: YES

IP obtained: YES

Internet detected: NO

But you don’t get a Captive Portal indication. Check on the Settings page to see if STATIC IP got turned on. Using a STATIC IP can cause connectivity problems. We want new current IP settings, by DHCP, from the current Hotspot. Otherwise, the connection gets broken. We can’t get to the Internet FROM an IP that is not valid for this Hotspot.

Turn that toggle switch back to OFF, click the “Change Settings” button, and then recheck the Current Connection information. I should populate with settings obtained from the Hotspot. Check on the Scan page if it now indicates connected. You might have to disconnect and re-connect again. But you should get connected and online.

A captive portal is a web page displayed to newly connected users of a WiFi network. It requires some sort of interaction before granting access to network resources. In other words – if you want to connect to a network that runs that, you need to go through a captive portal first.

Captive portals present a landing or log-in page, which may require credentials or other agreements acknowledged to gain Internet access.

Wave WiFi receivers usually detect Captive Portal and display means to open the required page. If that doesn’t work, you might have to get creative to force that page to appear.

1. You can try just opening another tab in your browser and try to go to any web page. That might kick off the Captive Portal web page.
2. Try looking in the Settings page, in your Wave WiFi receiver, for “Current Connection:” and within that find “Gateway:”. Open a new tab and try to go to http://, where gateway ip is that IP next to Gateway.
3. Try making sure any HTTPS tabs/pages are closed. Close your email program or any other Internet using software as they might use HTTPS type connections. Try opening an “HTTP://” website. (This might be hard to do these days as even Google and Yahoo re-direct you to HTTPS for their websites.) Try this one: http://neverssl.com/ – it is meant for this purpose.
4. Contact Marina Office and ask if there is a specific sign-on URL (web address) that you can use to sign in.
5. Check your browser settings for things that prevent re-directs or pop-ups from being displayed.

Note: On some systems that are accessed remotely over the Internet, port forwarding is not needed. They make an outbound connection to “The Cloud” – to servers of their manufacturer, and by doing so, allow the incoming connection. Usually, incoming connections cannot pass the NAT boundary between Public IP and Private IP. Routers do not know which computer or device should receive traffic. Thus, Port Forwarding.

Our Router products already have Port Forwarding in: Settings > Port Forwarding. 

Note: Description is whatever you want to call it. Ports: Public is the port(s) accessed from the Internet (outside the boat). Ports: Private is the port or ports range (inside the boat) (usually the same as Public) of your device or system needing remote access. The protocol is the TCP/IP protocol (TCP, UDP, or BOTH). IP: is the inside IP Address of your device or system needing remote access. Usually, the IP is 192.168.101.X or 192.168.105.X depending on whether this device is on Router Ethernet Port #1 (blue port, aka Main LAN) or Port #5 (far left yellow port, aka Guest LAN). The AP – WiFi Access Point of the Router is configured (in Local APs) linked to Router Ethernet Port #1. So, a device on WiFi would be forwarded to as if it were on Ethernet Port #1. It is possible to Port Forward from a WiFi Receiver to the router and then forward to your device or system. We have an instruction document on how to do this.

Our products are not locked to a particular cellular provider (carrier). You need a 2FF (Form Factor) Sim Card (usually given on a 1FF credit card sized card.) already activated, data only, no E911 services on it. You are free to choose your carrier. We are not a cell service provider; we are just providing the equipment to help you connect to Cellular 3G – 4G further than you otherwise could and share that to multiple users’ devices onboard.