My Wifi Posts have been wrong!! I admit it.

westernrvparkowner wrote:

This actually doesn't help in park situations. The data requests will just stack up, actually slowing the system down further. The problem is in a RV Park situation, people are totally content to start downloads or uploads and just walk away. So it takes an hour to send granny 100 photos or 3 minutes of HD video you shot, you don't care. However, wifi is not a steady stream. There are times when the demand exceeds the capacity of the network, and then a few seconds later the system is totally idle. If you go with the simple bandwidth throttles, the system cannot "burst" data in those idle periods, so the downloads and uploads take longer. This wouldn't be a problem, except for the fact that all wifi communications are two way, all the time. Your download constantly asks your computer if you are receiving the data. The longer the download takes, the more of these communications must be sent, increasing the traffic.

Actually it is helpful and is implemented in many commercial locations. Without throttling the users, you can get a few users hogging much of the bandwidth and leave everyone else without a useable connection. If you limit each user to 1meg down and half that up, which is enough to use VOIP or Skype as well as some youtube then it will be much longer before the system is bogged down by excess users. Nor do they leave enough overhead to deal with the increased traffic.

Nor are all the user on at the same time. Many guys use 60% of users who are actually active and using bandwidth at any given time to figure out bandwidth allotments for a specific internet connection.

Nor do the campgrounds actually monitor their networks and boot users who are hogging the system or force their computers to get new leases after a specific amount of time and boot them from their bandwidth hogging ways. When the figure out they can't stream TV all night they will just give up. That's what my bandwidth hogging friends do, they stream the park wifi until they can stream no more then move over to their cell signal.

There are many different ways to skin a cat, just blanket throttle is just one way and you can let guests know from the onset that the system is throttled to 1mbps out of fairness and to forget streaming movies and TV, because it's free after all.

Rarely does a campground a. use more then some consumer grade router that is placed in the office or b. have the system load balanced between 2 ISPs. It all depends on how much they want to invest in their system and monitor the health of that system when it's up.

Just as a test I limited my bandwidth to 1 meg and watched a youtube video. It reduced the speed from my un-throttled rate of 6.61 mbps to a rate of 64.55 Kbps. Which is an average of the connection. The burst pattern was basically identical. The lower end of youtube delivery is 210kbps.