garyemunson wrote:
Anyone else irked by chain parks that seem to think cable and internet are not necessary amenities?
No, I don't think they are necessary amenities, but I do like both, and try to pick my stops/ stays with those available. I've told more than one park management that I'm not staying at their park because they don't have those.
The first question that you have to ask yourself is are cable and internet technically feasible at the parks where you want to stay.
One located within 3-8 miles of a city of 10,000 or more - almost certainly.
An RV park located 35 miles from a city of over a million, it may not be technically feasible.
Costs - figure $1.50-3.00 per foot to run cable in an existing park. A 100 site park with 20' centers between spots is at least $4,000 for cable and $5,000 for the necessary equipment.
WiFi - runs close to $2,000 per acre to install a system available to folks in their rigs.
Cable - Is there a cable company able to provide service to that location? Is the park able to spend $8-10,000 to add their own satellite antennas, a multi-user system to put the TV signals out over the cable, and the costs of $ 5 to 9 per RV site per month for the satellite company service. There will be a similar, though slightly lower, cost for ever RV site on the property every month from a cable company.
An RV park will have to pay the cable company/ satellite company a set fee for every site on the property, every month. Figure a minimum of $1,000 per month every month for a 100 site RV park.
WiFi - Internet - this cost is going to be based upon bandwidth limits and the technical capacity of the 'pipe' to get the signal to the RV park. I know some popular tourist RV parks which have ONE phone line for dial-up speed internet. A dial-up modem will take close to one minute to load this page.
A cable connection or a phone company T-1 line is the minimum to consider sharing a connection with more than four or five people.
That's with no streaming of video. All major news websites - Fox, ABC, CNN, BBC, ESPN - stream video when they first load. It is a big bandwidth hit, and slows first loading of the news site.
My daughter sells satellite based internet setups to people in remote areas which cannot reach any wired internet source.
A business account starts at $450 per month for a 256K signal for every 10 users. That means a page like Fox News is going to take 30-45 seconds to load. To add capacity for that speed signal for 50 users costs $4,595 per month.
I'm as addicted to my TV and internet as anyone.
But we expect a 'wired' world. It always takes wire at some point to provide TV and internet. Some of the great places we go to simply don't have the wire available to make it happen.
