Wifi a dream pipe

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.

rwbradly pretty much nailed it here. As a network engineer I would add two more factors.

1. The radio spectrum used for wifi is unregulated. Anyone can use it, and they do. The 2.4 spectrum is getting rather crowded. If it interferes with your wifi, tough beans, nothing you can do.

2. The business grade wifi points that don't need rebooted every few days, have a centralized controller that allow them to mesh together, have good antennas, have the intelligence to find unused radio spectrum holes, and have the capacity to connect hundreds of clients at once are out of the budget range for most RV parks. They just buy a linksys AP and slap it in to say they have WiFi.