A VPN encrypts everything your laptop or phone sends and routes it through a server somewhere else, so whoever else is on the network you just joined cannot see what you are doing. That sounds like an abstract security lecture right up until you are parked at a campground where the Wi-Fi password is written on a card at the office window and forty other rigs are on the same network. We run NordVPN on our laptops and phones, and Nathan pays extra for the dedicated IP add-on because his job needs him to show up from the same address every day.
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Why this matters more in an RV than in a house
In a house you have one network. You set the password, you know every device on it, and you use it for years. Full-time RV life is the opposite. In a normal month we might join a campground network, a truck stop, a laundromat, a library, a coffee shop, a friend's guest Wi-Fi, and an airport, plus family Wi-Fi in Brazil. Every one of those is a network somebody else runs, with strangers on it, and you have no idea what shape it is in.
Campground Wi-Fi in particular is usually one password shared with the entire park. That means everyone camped around you is on the same network you are, which is not a group of people you screened. Add the fake hotspot problem, where somebody parks a router named something like “Campground-Guest-WiFi” and waits for people to connect to it, and you have a network you should not be typing a bank password into without protection.
What it actually does when you join a strange network
Once you connect, your traffic leaves your device already encrypted and comes out at a NordVPN server. The campground, the truck stop, and whoever else is on that network see an encrypted tunnel and nothing else. Not the sites you visited, not what you sent.
We should be honest about the limits, because a lot of VPN marketing is not. Most of the web is on HTTPS now, so your bank login was already encrypted before you installed anything. What the VPN adds is coverage for the rest: which sites you are visiting at all, DNS lookups, and any app on your phone that is sloppier about encryption than your browser is. On a network full of strangers, that is the gap worth closing.
One practical note. Campground and hotel Wi-Fi often makes you accept terms on a login page first. Connect to the network and clear that page, then turn the VPN on. If you do it the other way around, the login page never loads and you will think the Wi-Fi is broken.
The dedicated IP, and why it is the reason we pay
This is the part that made NordVPN worth it for us rather than just a nice idea.
Nathan works a full-time remote job from the rig. Our internet is Starlink, and Starlink puts customers behind carrier-grade NAT, which is a technical way of saying your public IP address is shared with other people and changes on its own. So from his employer's point of view, he logs in Monday from one address and Tuesday from a different one, sometimes appearing to be in a different city entirely. Corporate security tools react to that exactly how you would expect: extra multi-factor prompts, sessions that drop, login alerts, and anything with an IP allowlist simply refuses to let you in.
The dedicated IP add-on gives you one address that belongs to your account and nobody else's. Turn it on and work sees the same IP in the same place every single day, whether the rig is in Michigan or Florida. That is it. That is the whole feature, and it is the difference between a job that tolerates working from the road and one that stops noticing.
If your company allowlists IPs for a VPN, an admin panel, or a database, this is the piece that makes it possible from a moving house. Talk to your IT department before you set it up rather than after. Some companies want to know, some have rules about it, and the conversation goes much better when you are asking instead of explaining.
The same idea helps outside of work. Banks and financial sites get suspicious when you log in from a new state every couple of weeks, and connecting from a consistent address cuts down on the locked accounts and identity quizzes.
Two countries, one household
Fabiola is Brazilian, and a fair number of Brazilian sites and services behave badly when they see a US address, or block it outright. Connecting through a server in Brazil makes those work the way they do at home. It runs the other direction too: when we are visiting family in Brazil, a US server keeps our American accounts working normally.
Streaming is the obvious use people ask about, and here the honest answer is that every service has its own terms about it, and you should read them before you count on it working.
What to know before you buy
It is not internet. A VPN does nothing on its own, it needs a connection to run over, so this is something you add on top of Starlink or a hotspot and not a replacement for either.
It costs a little speed. Your traffic is taking a detour, so there is a small tax. On a good connection with a nearby server we do not notice it on video calls or uploads. On a weak campground connection you will feel it, and that is one of the times we drop back to Starlink and skip the campground Wi-Fi entirely.
The dedicated IP is a paid add-on, not part of the base plan, so budget for it separately if that is the feature you came for. Pricing and plan names change often enough that you should check the current numbers rather than trust ours.
Some sites block VPN traffic on principle. A few shopping sites, a few banks, the occasional government portal. You will end up toggling it off now and then, which is a minor annoyance and not a reason to skip it.
One subscription covers ten devices, which for us means two laptops, two phones, and a tablet with room left over. That is worth knowing if you have been pricing this out per person.
Where to get it
You can get NordVPN through our link here, and if you work remotely, look at the dedicated IP add-on at checkout rather than deciding later, since it is the piece that solves the changing-address problem.
The rest of what keeps us online and working from the rig is in our filming and internet tech roundup, and if you want to see the setup behind all of it, here is our boondocking setup.
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