Forum Discussion
Jim
Feb 01, 2018Explorer
Most RV parks have shared Wifi, and during my 14 years of full timing, I've found it to be wildly frustrating to find good, consistent high speed internet while traveling. The further east I travel, the worse it becomes so I tend to stay in the west. I gave up boondocking years ago because dealing with the energy, water, sewage issues just made it too difficult when trying to stay online more than an hour per day. So I've tended to use RV parks, with their inconsistent Wifi services.
It's getting better in RV parks though. Right now staying at a park in warm Yuma ($199+/mo special this month, $299+/mo from next month on) with 8 Mbps download speed on their free Wifi. That high of speed for a run of the mill RV park 8 miles from town is quite nice. Can't stream videos because it's a shared resource and it stutters (throttled or just busy?) but it's speed is still good for my purposes.
However, more and more these days, I'm running into large RV parks with many guests where I can stream Netflix, one up in Pahrump, Nevada comes to mind. So it's getting better. On the other hand, I've also run into parks that have a local throttling setup, with real time censorship. The worse parks tho tend to be those that hire outside companies like Tengo, or Brighthouse to manage their systems. Gah! I hate those guys...usually. And it seems like entire towns either have fair to good Wifi, or poor to awful.
There are a few parks where they've wired up each site with DSL for month2month guests that want high speed (limited as DSL is). I also stayed at a couple parks that provide Wifi via the latest HughesNet satellite system this past year (36Gbps/3Gbps, but data usage monitored daily and connection cut off if limit is exceeded). I just sold my old mobile HughesNet satellite setup since I don't need it much anymore as RV parks have improved their Wifi from when I bought it.
Can't say that RV parks in general have fast enough Wifi for a IT professional. Some do, most do not. Satellite would be your best bet but it's expensive, plus you'd need lots of expensive solar along with a backup generator for boondocking. Cell phone, as mentioned, is throttled, expensive, and spotty where you'd want to boondock.
It's getting better in RV parks though. Right now staying at a park in warm Yuma ($199+/mo special this month, $299+/mo from next month on) with 8 Mbps download speed on their free Wifi. That high of speed for a run of the mill RV park 8 miles from town is quite nice. Can't stream videos because it's a shared resource and it stutters (throttled or just busy?) but it's speed is still good for my purposes.
However, more and more these days, I'm running into large RV parks with many guests where I can stream Netflix, one up in Pahrump, Nevada comes to mind. So it's getting better. On the other hand, I've also run into parks that have a local throttling setup, with real time censorship. The worse parks tho tend to be those that hire outside companies like Tengo, or Brighthouse to manage their systems. Gah! I hate those guys...usually. And it seems like entire towns either have fair to good Wifi, or poor to awful.
There are a few parks where they've wired up each site with DSL for month2month guests that want high speed (limited as DSL is). I also stayed at a couple parks that provide Wifi via the latest HughesNet satellite system this past year (36Gbps/3Gbps, but data usage monitored daily and connection cut off if limit is exceeded). I just sold my old mobile HughesNet satellite setup since I don't need it much anymore as RV parks have improved their Wifi from when I bought it.
Can't say that RV parks in general have fast enough Wifi for a IT professional. Some do, most do not. Satellite would be your best bet but it's expensive, plus you'd need lots of expensive solar along with a backup generator for boondocking. Cell phone, as mentioned, is throttled, expensive, and spotty where you'd want to boondock.
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