Why must wifi be so bad

paulcardoza wrote:
@westernrvparkowner --- Just to understand better, what type of internet feed do your parks have? Does your location have access to true broadband internet via cable or fiber? Or are you stuck with slower/more expensive options only?

We are seasonal at a CG that has me so totally confused. They recently did a major upgrade of the wifi infrastructure in the park. New access points everywhere give a very strong wifi signal, no matter where you are located.

They also are fed by Xfinity broadband. In fact, near the entrance and outside the CG, xfinity wifi is also readily available and provides decent speeds.

HOWEVER, after clearly spending a lot of money on the wifi infrastructure, they decided to take the broadband stream and route it through tengointernet. As with every other tengo served CG I have been to, performance is useless, regardless of time of day, or how crowded the CG is.

I'm not a wifi techie by any means, but some logic should apply here. I work in an office with several hundred employees. We have a single broadband internet feed (Fios) and it services everyone via wired and wifi all day long, with no speed deficiencies. Our monthly cost for the highest available Fios speed is $450.

I just don't get the tengo solution at all.............

All that infrastructure is most likely Tengo's equipment. As I have repeatedly said, what works in your office, what works in your neighborhood McDonalds or Starbucks really doesn't translate to the usage in an RV Park. At your office, how many of your several hundred employees are sitting around their cubicles streaming movies? If it is like most offices, many websites are blocked (sports sites, entertainment sites, porn sites etc). Wifi is there to conduct business. That means spread sheets, emails, processing orders etc. That is very low graphics, hence very small data usage. Same with McDonalds or Starbucks. There might, repeat might, be 10 people on the system. Doubtful that any of them are streaming a m movie.
Your problem in your park is almost assuredly the upload portion of wifi. First, most wifi providers upload speeds are around 10 to 20 percent of the download speed. RV parks have many guests who upload large files, which is very uncommon. They upload their daily photos. Today, even phones take HD video, which is a huge bandwidth hog. Get two or three of those being uploaded and the entire network will bog down.
Finally, upload speeds depends on the ability of YOUR device to communicate with the access point. The wifi system in your park has a transmitter that is multiple times faster than the transmitter in your device and has an antenna 100s of times larger than the antenna in yours. On top of that, many device makers (Apple is the worst offender) have de-powered their wifi radios to increase battery life. Even when you are downloading a movie, your device needs to constantly communicate with the server sending the movie. If your device needs to "ping" the access point multiple times to establish each communication, your speed will be close to nil.
The quickest way to test for those issues is to get outside of your rig and check your speeds (speedtest.net is a great resource) as you get closer and closer to an access point. If the speeds increase dramatically, and your device showed a strong signal inside your RV (which you said it did), then the problem is your device communicating with the access point. In that case, your best solution is to use a powered external antenna attached to a router configured as a bridge. A decent system would cost you around $400.00 ($100 for a Ubiquiti Bullet to power the antenna, $200 for a decent sector antenna and $100 for the router).