Van life internet in Europe: what we use, what we wasted money on, and how it’s changed

Getting reliable van life internet across Europe comes down to two things: a Starlink Mini for remote areas and a 4G/5G SIM card as a backup for low-power days and cities.

That sentence took us four years and a fair amount of wasted money to arrive at. When we moved into the van in 2022, Starlink was still quite new and expensive enough that we wanted to wait and see whether it lived up to the hype before committing. Unlike a lot of van lifers, we both worked remotely full-time, so reliable internet was never optional. We started, like most people start, with SIM cards and hope.

I want to write this the way I wish someone had written it for me before we set off – not a list of every possible option that exists, but an honest account of what we tried, in the order we tried it, and what we think now. If you want the broader picture of what four years of van life across Europe actually looks like, I wrote about it here.

tl;dr

• For the first two years of van life, we used SIM cards only – it worked, but it shaped where we parked in ways we didn’t love
• We purchased Starlink Standard in year two, and upgraded to Starlink Mini after that and have used it almost exclusively since
• We still carry a Telekom e-SIM (€19.50/month, 50GB EU roaming + 300GB in Spain) for cloudy weeks and city days
• Our total monthly internet spend is around €76
• A WiFi booster and a SIM router were both complete wastes of money for us – more on that below

Can you do van life in Europe with just a SIM card?

For the first couple of years, SIM cards were our only option. We were careful with money in the early days of van life – as most people are – and Starlink was new enough and expensive enough that it felt like a gamble. So we did what made sense at the time: we found a SIM plan with decent EU roaming, hotspotted from our phones, and got on with it.

The problem with mobile data as your only internet is that coverage follows people. Cities, towns, main roads – signal is excellent. The moment you park somewhere remote, somewhere without another soul in sight, the bars disappear. We made countless drives to beautiful destinations only to find no signal, and had to turn around and keep driving. For someone who doesn’t have a 9 am video call the next morning, that might not be a problem. For us, it was.

And I think this is the real dividing line: whether you rely on the internet for work or for fun and entertainment. If it’s the latter, you can plan around it. If it’s the former, the signal situation shapes your whole day before it even starts.

Across two years, those small decisions – parking closer to a town than we wanted to, choosing one valley over another – added up to a version of van life that was shaped by connectivity rather than by where we wanted to be. That bothered me more than the dropped video calls did.

Do WiFi boosters or SIM routers work in a van?

Before we get to Starlink, I want to be honest about the detours, because I have seen these products recommended repeatedly, and our experience was not great.

WiFi boosters. We bought one. We tested it, and we noticed no difference whatsoever in connection quality or range. None. If anything, it added clutter and a cable I kept standing on.

SIM routers. We tried one of these too, under the theory that a dedicated router would give us a stronger, more stable connection than hotspotting from a phone. It did not. Hotspotting from a phone delivered equivalent results with considerably less faff, and the router itself turned out to be incapable of catching a 5G signal, which is a real problem with cheaper models that is not always obvious from the listing. If you are considering a SIM router, check the 5G compatibility carefully. But unless you have a specific reason to need one, your phone as a hotspot is probably enough.

I do not think these products are useless in every situation. I think they made more sense before satellite internet became as accessible as it now is. For us in 2026, neither would come back into the van.

We finally got Starlink

By year two, we had enough of our own experience – and enough from people we had met on the road – to feel confident that Starlink was worth the investment.

I remember the specific moment when I felt so happy with this decision. We were parked in the Cantabria mountains in northern Spain – a spot we would never have chosen in the SIM-card years because there was zero phone signal there. I opened my laptop. The connection was fast. Tom was on a work video call. The latency was 31 milliseconds. Outside the window, there were mountains as far as the eye could see.

We first purchased the Starlink Standard Actuated Kit with Pipe Adapter and mounted the dish on a pole attached to our bike rack, which took some trial and error to get stable in strong winds, but worked well once we figured it out – thanks to Tom’s dad, who built the mount for us. Setting up through the Starlink app takes about ten minutes the first time; after that, it is a one-minute job. The dish finds satellites on its own.

One thing we did not expect: police once drove past our parking spot in the countryside and stopped to tell us to move the dish closer to the van. We were in an empty car park, nobody else around. We still do not know whether they did not recognise what it was or simply did not like the look of something sitting that far from the vehicle. Either way, we moved it. The problem is that the closer the dish sits to the van, the more likely trees or the van itself block the sky view – and we were already dealing with that in wooded spots regardless. With the pole at the back, if trees were behind us, the dish was pointless. Putting it on the roof was often equally pointless for the same reason. Sometimes you need to move the dish further from the van to get a clear sky, and that is not always possible or welcome.

The AGM battery lesson

At this point, we were running a 260Ah AGM deep-cycle leisure battery with an inverter. AGM batteries have a real limitation: they do not like being discharged below 50%, which means you only have access to half the stated capacity, and they charge more slowly from solar than lithium does. On sunny days, the standard Starlink ran fine. On grey days, it was a different story.

I found this out the hard way during a week in Santander. Tom was away, so it was me, the dogs, and a week of solid rain. Not a single break in the clouds, not a moment of useful solar. I ran the standard Starlink for a few hours one morning and watched the battery drop fast. By the middle of my working day, it was empty. No internet, no way to charge anything, no Tom to help troubleshoot.

I remember walking around Santander in the rain looking for a café with power sockets. The only place I found was a McDonald’s. I sat there for a few hours with a breakfast I didn’t particularly want, charged everything I had, and felt more stressed than I had in months. I found a remote co-working space online that afternoon and booked in for the rest of the week. For the next four days, I worked five hours from the co-working space – leaving Summer and Shadow in the van, which I had never done for that long before and hated – and came back to the van with everything fully charged to work the final three hours from there. It was manageable, but not how I wanted to spend a week.

That experience is a big part of why we upgraded both the battery and the dish.

What is the difference between Starlink Standard and Starlink Mini for van life?

After about a year with the original Starlink, we switched to the Starlink Mini, and it is what we use now.

The Mini is much smaller – roughly the size of a laptop – and considerably lighter, which matters when you are packing and unpacking it regularly and have limited storage space. The original dish was not enormous, but it was not small either.

The bigger reason was power. The Mini draws 20 to 40 watts, similar to a laptop running normally. The original dish was significantly more demanding. We also upgraded our battery in 2025, moving from the 260Ah AGM to a 300Ah LiFePO4 lithium battery with a 1500W inverter. Lithium batteries can be discharged much more deeply without damage and charge faster from solar, both of which matter when you are running everything off panels on a roof. The Mini runs off our indoor 240V outlet through that setup. On a decent solar day, it runs all day. On a grey November week in northern Spain, we switch to the SIM card.

Performance-wise, we have not noticed a difference for the things we use the internet for: video calls, uploading content, and working in cloud-based tools fast enough that we forget about it, which is the honest goal.

Do you still need a SIM card if you have Starlink?

We have had the same Telekom e-SIM for over four years – since the very beginning of van life. The plan has changed over time as their pricing evolved, but we have stayed with them because it has always worked, and in our experience, they have the best customer service. Our current plan is €19.50 per month: 50GB of EU roaming across Europe and the UK, plus 300GB in Spain.

The SIM card is no longer our primary internet. It is our backup for three situations: cloudy or overcast weeks when we want to conserve battery, city parking where the mobile signal is strong and the sky view is poor, and driving days when the Mini is packed away, and we need to look something up on the road.

Between those three, we have never been without internet.

How much does van life internet cost per month in Europe?

The Mini hardware cost us €249. I always say check starlink.com directly for current prices before buying – they have changed several times since we got ours, and the plan pricing shifts too. Our €56.33 was the result of a deal at signup; the standard Roam Unlimited rate in Europe is higher than that, so do not assume you will pay exactly what we pay.

You can pause the Roam plan through the app with a 5-euro per month cost.

Is Starlink worth it if you are not full-time?

My honest answer is that I would recommend it to almost anyone who spends real time in remote areas, not just people living in a van full-time. And not necessarily because of work. When you are parked somewhere with nothing around for miles, you might need a map that loads, a weather forecast that updates, or the ability to look something up when something goes wrong. A SIM card does not give you that in the places where you most need it.

If you are weekend camping on established routes and campsites, you can do your research beforehand and hotspot from a local SIM on the road. That works fine for that kind of trip. The further off the beaten track you go, the less it does.

For full-time van life in Europe in 2026, the best internet setup is Starlink Mini as your primary connection and a data SIM as a backup.

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