Wifi a dream pipe

[AmericaOverland]

Why is it that wifi is generally unreliable even during the day on a beautiful day with no wind? Is it that the park doesn't know a thing about how to make wifi work? I've been at the last two parks in Texas, and they cannot get their wifi working right for the first several weeks after replacing/upgrading equipment.

[YC_1]

If the water hose supplying water to 100 folks is only a 1/2 inch hose you won't get much available to each person. As mentioned, rural parks and even those that seem to be in the heart of things may not have the Volume of bandwidth available.

It can cost tens of thousands to set up an area to satisfy all the wimpy Wi-Fi devices surrounded by metal skins on rv's.

[YC_1]

Wishbone51 wrote:
Does wind affect radio waves?

It costs a lot to have a good public wi-fi system. Also the proper bandwith needed isn't generally available in rural areas where RV parks tend to hang out.

I will answer your question about wind and radio waves. Yes it can. Moving leaves on trees and bushes can block signals. As a two way radio technician monitoring radio traffic you can tell when a mobile unit is driving by orchards due to the "picket fence" effect. Of course the vehicle is moving in the scenario and not the trees or leaves.

[PawPaw_n_Gram]

AmericaOverland wrote:
I hate it because I will eat through 5 GB of data in two weeks if I don't use wifi.

Unfortunately, the internet has become a data hog with all the streaming that is done today. We can't even check a news site without getting about 5 mb of commercial videos to 1/4 mb of actual data.

AmericaOverland wrote:
The tower is but 20 feet away, the owner just paid a lot of money to upgrade it last month, and it doesn't even work reliably, not even during the day when most people are not home.

As mentioned above - the repeater being close to you isn't important. How close the repeater is to the data access point in the CG is important.

I worked on a project where we put WiFi into our corporate HQ building several years ago. We found that even the best manufacturer estimates about range and reliability were grossly over optimistic. The project ended up with us adding three times as many hot spots as planned before we got the service level we wanted.

I'm sure the park owner got a bid/ plan that simply wasn't adequate for the demand. Because the contractor tried to meet a price the CG owner could afford.

Glenn Heights doesn't have a great wired infrastructure, so even with a great WiFi setup in the RV park, the 'pipe' to the outside world is too small for great service.

[Old-Biscuit]

Verizon.

Provide your own IF you want reliable....forget about CG WiFi

[tpi]

Since it is poor during times when no one is around, I'd do some troubleshooting. Are there other towers which give better performance? Do others in the campground have the same issues? If some work OK, you may want to check your network adapter driver, or use another wifi adapter. Certain hardware combinations somehow are not compatible.

How does it work for simple web browsing or emailing off peak?

There are longer distance wifi adapters available-if other hotspots work better . If it is a failure of the park's system and fails during off peak times when it should be working properly, keep bringing it to attention of office.

[AmericaOverland]

To clarify, for instance. I'm at an RV park in Glenn Heights, not exactly in the woods. In fact, I hear sirens as a result of accidents every day. I'll see a speed of about 10 mbps for a few seconds, and then completely stops. Other times, it's 1.5 mbps, and when I do a trace route to a web site, I get single and tripled starred on one of the responses along the path, and it stops cold. The computer says that the network can't be joined. I hate it because I will eat through 5 GB of data in two weeks if I don't use wifi. The tower is but 20 feet away, the owner just paid a lot of money to upgrade it last month, and it doesn't even work reliably, not even during the day when most people are not home. Once the two programs I watch have their final finale, I will never use wifi to watch anything. I use the Internet mainly to read books and stay in touch with friends.

[Thunder_Mountai]

rwbradley wrote:
I will assume this is a serious question and not rhetorical.
There are a number of factors:
1) campgrounds generally are in rural or even isolated areas and internet infrastructure spending is being spent more often in cities where there is more return on investment (more customers=more revenue). For this reason DSL is almost unheard of, cable is nowhere near as fast as in the cities, business class fiber based solutions come with huge (6-7 digit) build costs and very large monthly costs and Satellite is slow and very costly making it unsuitable for a lot of applications.
2) if you figure a campground has 100 sites and every trailer has 4 devices (2 phones, a laptop and an iPad) that is 400 devices and assuming a 25mbps cable connection in the park that is 62.5kbps per device (dialup speed)
3) most campground wifi networks are designed using wifi repeaters. The basic premise is there is a router in the office at the front of the park with a wireless access point. This access point will only reach a few rows into the park. In order to get to the back of the park they will "repeat" the signal off a bunch of additional wireless access points every few rows back in the park. The problem is that repeating has a big cost, it means that 50% of the capacity of the access point is used to relay to the next access point in the chain. Imagine for a minute that they have 802.11G in the park and have 5 access points relayed together. The first access point runs at 54mbps, the 2nd because half the capacity is used to relay to the first, it only has 27mbps of usable capacity, now imagine the 3rd one, it can only get up to 27mbps but has to use half to relay to the slower 27mbps access point that leaves 13.5, now go to the fourth it only has 6.75mbps, and the fifth only has 3.375. This makes the back of the campground very very slow
4) think about all the people in this forum asking how to run Netflix on the free WIFI at the campground. If everyone in the campground is trying to watch the new season of House of Cards in HD, they are using about 2mbps each. With only 25mbps capacity in the park that leaves less than 13 trailers (of 100) can watch it in HD. Add all the grandmothers trying to Skype to their grandkids and all the kids watching Minecraft videos on Youtube and it is like trying to fit a watermelon thru a garden hose.

Realistically the only way to get usable speeds in a campground is being willing to pay way more ie double or triple what we pay now so they can get business class internet and have the WIFI network built with Ethernet or Fiber connected hardware thru the campground. The costs to do this for a campground would be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars capital cost and thousands of dollars per month. Instead of $50 per month for 25mbps of Cable and $500 in consumer grade Wireless access points from Best Buy.

Yep! Too many pigs at the trough and not enough room. I think that is called bandwidth. We now have an AT&T Netgear hotspot to use on the road. Actually ran into a couple of campgrounds in Arizona this winter that worked about 50-75% of the time. I was a real shock since a majority of the campground Wifi networks are useless except in the wee hours when others are sleeping.

[westernrvparkow]

rwbradley wrote:
I will assume this is a serious question and not rhetorical.
There are a number of factors:
1) campgrounds generally are in rural or even isolated areas and internet infrastructure spending is being spent more often in cities where there is more return on investment (more customers=more revenue). For this reason DSL is almost unheard of, cable is nowhere near as fast as in the cities, business class fiber based solutions come with huge (6-7 digit) build costs and very large monthly costs and Satellite is slow and very costly making it unsuitable for a lot of applications.
2) if you figure a campground has 100 sites and every trailer has 4 devices (2 phones, a laptop and an iPad) that is 400 devices and assuming a 25mbps cable connection in the park that is 62.5kbps per device (dialup speed)
3) most campground wifi networks are designed using wifi repeaters. The basic premise is there is a router in the office at the front of the park with a wireless access point. This access point will only reach a few rows into the park. In order to get to the back of the park they will "repeat" the signal off a bunch of additional wireless access points every few rows back in the park. The problem is that repeating has a big cost, it means that 50% of the capacity of the access point is used to relay to the next access point in the chain. Imagine for a minute that they have 802.11G in the park and have 5 access points relayed together. The first access point runs at 54mbps, the 2nd because half the capacity is used to relay to the first, it only has 27mbps of usable capacity, now imagine the 3rd one, it can only get up to 27mbps but has to use half to relay to the slower 27mbps access point that leaves 13.5, now go to the fourth it only has 6.75mbps, and the fifth only has 3.375. This makes the back of the campground very very slow
4) think about all the people in this forum asking how to run Netflix on the free WIFI at the campground. If everyone in the campground is trying to watch the new season of House of Cards in HD, they are using about 2mbps each. With only 25mbps capacity in the park that leaves less than 13 trailers (of 100) can watch it in HD. Add all the grandmothers trying to Skype to their grandkids and all the kids watching Minecraft videos on Youtube and it is like trying to fit a watermelon thru a garden hose.

Realistically the only way to get usable speeds in a campground is being willing to pay way more ie double or triple what we pay now so they can get business class internet and have the WIFI network built with Ethernet or Fiber connected hardware thru the campground. The costs to do this for a campground would be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars capital cost and thousands of dollars per month. Instead of $50 per month for 25mbps of Cable and $500 in consumer grade Wireless access points from Best Buy.

Pretty much spot on. And just to add a point of comparison, I just finished a Cross Country trip with about 15 hotel overnights (La Quinta, Courtyard and Best Western Plus) and in about 10 of them the wifi was basically worthless and all I was doing was checking E-mails. I imagine all lodging establishments are facing basically the same issue, the usage of bandwidth is growing exponentially faster than the ability to provide it. And yes, McDonalds or Starbucks with it's half dozen people on line at any one time, none of whom are streaming movies can easily provide that service. Someone slipping into their PJs and settling down for the night is a different story.

[rwbradley]

I will assume this is a serious question and not rhetorical.
There are a number of factors:
1) campgrounds generally are in rural or even isolated areas and internet infrastructure spending is being spent more often in cities where there is more return on investment (more customers=more revenue). For this reason DSL is almost unheard of, cable is nowhere near as fast as in the cities, business class fiber based solutions come with huge (6-7 digit) build costs and very large monthly costs and Satellite is slow and very costly making it unsuitable for a lot of applications.
2) if you figure a campground has 100 sites and every trailer has 4 devices (2 phones, a laptop and an iPad) that is 400 devices and assuming a 25mbps cable connection in the park that is 62.5kbps per device (dialup speed)
3) most campground wifi networks are designed using wifi repeaters. The basic premise is there is a router in the office at the front of the park with a wireless access point. This access point will only reach a few rows into the park. In order to get to the back of the park they will "repeat" the signal off a bunch of additional wireless access points every few rows back in the park. The problem is that repeating has a big cost, it means that 50% of the capacity of the access point is used to relay to the next access point in the chain. Imagine for a minute that they have 802.11G in the park and have 5 access points relayed together. The first access point runs at 54mbps, the 2nd because half the capacity is used to relay to the first, it only has 27mbps of usable capacity, now imagine the 3rd one, it can only get up to 27mbps but has to use half to relay to the slower 27mbps access point that leaves 13.5, now go to the fourth it only has 6.75mbps, and the fifth only has 3.375. This makes the back of the campground very very slow
4) think about all the people in this forum asking how to run Netflix on the free WIFI at the campground. If everyone in the campground is trying to watch the new season of House of Cards in HD, they are using about 2mbps each. With only 25mbps capacity in the park that leaves less than 13 trailers (of 100) can watch it in HD. Add all the grandmothers trying to Skype to their grandkids and all the kids watching Minecraft videos on Youtube and it is like trying to fit a watermelon thru a garden hose.

Realistically the only way to get usable speeds in a campground is being willing to pay way more ie double or triple what we pay now so they can get business class internet and have the WIFI network built with Ethernet or Fiber connected hardware thru the campground. The costs to do this for a campground would be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars capital cost and thousands of dollars per month. Instead of $50 per month for 25mbps of Cable and $500 in consumer grade Wireless access points from Best Buy.

[Wishbone51]

Does wind affect radio waves?

It costs a lot to have a good public wi-fi system. Also the proper bandwith needed isn't generally available in rural areas where RV parks tend to hang out.

[Johno02]

You said it --"wifi is generally unreliable ... in Texas". Texas is a BIG place, and WIFI range is quite short.