Wifi a dream pipe
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...
Forum Discussion
Check broadband.gov about coverage. The real issue for urban folks expectations is the lack of geographic coverage for wired broadband at consumer prices. Once you get outside major urban areas and off the trunk travel routes, there is no infrastructure for connection of a wifi hotspot. McD pays trunkline carriers hundreds of thousands to run a connection to each rural store. RV park operators don't have the revenue to buy that.
It has to do with settlement patterns. In 2012 the Universal Broadband initiative was reporting about 65% of households had broadband available, geographic coverage at less than 20% to do that. That was when FCC defined broadband as 10Mbps down, 1 Mbps up. You could fill in some gaps with satellite internet, extend a few miles beyond reach of cable networks and DSL grade landlines with microwave. But campgrounds are usually somewhere outside of town, more than a few miles from the end of the cable, more than a few thousand yards from a wireline substation.
FCC just raised the bar to 30 Mbps down, 3 Mbps up. That makes the problem look a whole lot worse, because much of the wiring used for DSL won't sustain that, existing microwave repeaters won't do it, and the technologies used for much of IP over video cable to residences won't do the upload speed. This is a little bit of arm twisting for funding, broadband initiative is looking for a "universal service fee" applied to Internet, so that urban customers easy to connect can pay for connecting us folks out in the sticks, the way AT&T pushed it through for telephone landlines.
Anyway, you have all these people showing up in campgrounds now wanting to stream video and do video conference or VOIP over WiFi, 3 to 10 MBps each. First, that takes a lot of bandwidth just on the WiFi. But behind that you need a really fat line to the Internet backbone, maybe Gbps or better. Best the CG owner might be able to do could be 3-5 Mbps total, if he can get spot beamed satellite or is close enough to town to set up a beamed microwave solution, though most of those around here are 1Mbps or slower, most often around 100k to 250k. Lacking that, best they can do might be 56Kbps on a pair of rural voice grade landlines, dialup on demand.
If you've not lived in a rural area, and tried to get broadband service, you might be thinking it is everywhere, because it blankets your metropolitan area. The service simply is not available. Wireless broadband (not meeting FCC's new definition) has broader coverage, but is much more expensive to provide with present limits on wireless bandwidth.
Places used as examples of what could be done, like Japan, have very small areas to cover and much higher concentration of the consumer population.
It has to do with settlement patterns. In 2012 the Universal Broadband initiative was reporting about 65% of households had broadband available, geographic coverage at less than 20% to do that. That was when FCC defined broadband as 10Mbps down, 1 Mbps up. You could fill in some gaps with satellite internet, extend a few miles beyond reach of cable networks and DSL grade landlines with microwave. But campgrounds are usually somewhere outside of town, more than a few miles from the end of the cable, more than a few thousand yards from a wireline substation.
FCC just raised the bar to 30 Mbps down, 3 Mbps up. That makes the problem look a whole lot worse, because much of the wiring used for DSL won't sustain that, existing microwave repeaters won't do it, and the technologies used for much of IP over video cable to residences won't do the upload speed. This is a little bit of arm twisting for funding, broadband initiative is looking for a "universal service fee" applied to Internet, so that urban customers easy to connect can pay for connecting us folks out in the sticks, the way AT&T pushed it through for telephone landlines.
Anyway, you have all these people showing up in campgrounds now wanting to stream video and do video conference or VOIP over WiFi, 3 to 10 MBps each. First, that takes a lot of bandwidth just on the WiFi. But behind that you need a really fat line to the Internet backbone, maybe Gbps or better. Best the CG owner might be able to do could be 3-5 Mbps total, if he can get spot beamed satellite or is close enough to town to set up a beamed microwave solution, though most of those around here are 1Mbps or slower, most often around 100k to 250k. Lacking that, best they can do might be 56Kbps on a pair of rural voice grade landlines, dialup on demand.
If you've not lived in a rural area, and tried to get broadband service, you might be thinking it is everywhere, because it blankets your metropolitan area. The service simply is not available. Wireless broadband (not meeting FCC's new definition) has broader coverage, but is much more expensive to provide with present limits on wireless bandwidth.
Places used as examples of what could be done, like Japan, have very small areas to cover and much higher concentration of the consumer population.
