2oldman wrote:
Park wifi is usually slow because of too many people using it, not because of any signal boosters. The signal from the tower to you isn't the problem, it's the 'backhaul' to the internet.
precisely. think of a 4-lane tollway. traffic (the total number of campers in a park using the wifi) is moving just fine between the camper and the office's router (the toll booth) where the link between the router and the connection to the internet is made (DSL, cable, etc). the slower the DSL/cable connection (the fewer the number of toll takers there are) the more of a bottleneck occurs at the tollbooth (router). the larger the bottleneck the slower the system will be.
the other issue is poor engineering of the wifi network itself. even a medium sized park should probably have more than a single node in the park. a properly sized and engineered system will have multiple nodes sprinkled throughout the park and a robust internet connection. but that takes money and a lot of parks are reluctant or unable to spend those kinds of dollars. that's one reason why so many people are dumping the park's wifi in favor of their own personal hotspot devices such as mifi.
