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.

[wbwood]

What campers want

[wbwood]

westernrvparkowner wrote:

wbwood wrote:
We once went to a campground that asked us if we wanted internet access during our stay. They gave a username (site number) and a password. Then we got a lecture about not using it to watch movies, facebook and whole laundry list. She said they were on satellite internet and they had a certain amount of usage and if they went over, then they would be blocked for 24 hours and they used it for the business too. First of all, that sounded like a dumb business plan. And secondly, I told her no, that I was not going to be monitored like a child. Not that I woould of done any of that stuff, but when you start a long list of "do nots", then forget it. As others mentioned, you are not going to get internet like you do at home, at an RV Park. If you travel a good bit, then up your mobile plan and use it. We currently have 30GB of data on our plan. We are with AT&T and they offered us a special that they had for a short period. I think we had 5GB per phone before (3 phones) and then they doubled it from 15GB total to 30GB. I think it was an extra $25 or $30 a month. Not too shabby. Plus, they recently went with the roll over for the data. I think this month we started with somethign like 54GB. We are halfway through the billing cycle and have used less than 4GB of that. So we should be carrying over a good bit again.

Here's a hint. If you watch things on youtube, make sure you change the setting from HD. Watch it in a lower setting.. It will save bandwidth and will be faster for you.

If their only option for providing Wifi was Satellite, they were telling you the absolute truth. And if that didn't work for you, too bad. Most people would call it "appreciating the situation and acting accordingly". You, however felt it was "being monitored like a child". Guess it just depends on how you look at things.

When they give you a laundry list of do's and dont's at check in and then start listing things for you not to do on the internet, then no thanks. If a campground is dependent upon satellite internet and it will affect their business working, then they need to rethink their strategy. Perhaps not offering internet at all. In the situation with the park, it wasn't the issue of limited use of internet, but as to how they handled it. One of the owners walked around with the rules in their back pocket. Quiet time was at 9:00. At 8:30, he was going around telling people (kids) to be quiet. Kind of tells you how the "being monitored like a child" goes there. No way, am I going to be criticized of what I was doing on the internet or what I was looking at. I can hear it, "Mr Wood, we saw that you read 15 emails last night. 2 of them had links to videos on Youtube and clicked on them. That's in clear violation of our rules.....". You are right, I had the option. I chose not to. I also chose not to ever go back to their campground and gave them the review they deserved on how they "managed" things.

[pyoung47]

We are lucky enough to have a cell plan with unlimited data. We stream movies etc. quite a bit. Unfortunately, where we spent the winter had very poor cell data (ATT). The campground had great connection, since they had towers interspersed throughout the campground, but of course the bandwidth was inadequate. I have been to one campground where we were able to stream without a problem, and that was at Lone Star in Austin. They gave you a password for each day that you paid and for each device. It was an outside provider. I'm not sure how they provided that much bandwidth, but it seemed to work well. I wouldn't have a problem paying 30-40 bucks a month for the time that we are in Texas for the winter for dependable, high bandwidth service. Most of the campgrounds have not maintained their phone lines, so this is probably not really practical any more.

I don't think that many campers or campground owners really understand the difficulty of providing internet service on a level that folks have grown accustomed to at home.

[westernrvparkow]

wbwood wrote:
We once went to a campground that asked us if we wanted internet access during our stay. They gave a username (site number) and a password. Then we got a lecture about not using it to watch movies, facebook and whole laundry list. She said they were on satellite internet and they had a certain amount of usage and if they went over, then they would be blocked for 24 hours and they used it for the business too. First of all, that sounded like a dumb business plan. And secondly, I told her no, that I was not going to be monitored like a child. Not that I woould of done any of that stuff, but when you start a long list of "do nots", then forget it. As others mentioned, you are not going to get internet like you do at home, at an RV Park. If you travel a good bit, then up your mobile plan and use it. We currently have 30GB of data on our plan. We are with AT&T and they offered us a special that they had for a short period. I think we had 5GB per phone before (3 phones) and then they doubled it from 15GB total to 30GB. I think it was an extra $25 or $30 a month. Not too shabby. Plus, they recently went with the roll over for the data. I think this month we started with somethign like 54GB. We are halfway through the billing cycle and have used less than 4GB of that. So we should be carrying over a good bit again.

Here's a hint. If you watch things on youtube, make sure you change the setting from HD. Watch it in a lower setting.. It will save bandwidth and will be faster for you.

If their only option for providing Wifi was Satellite, they were telling you the absolute truth. And if that didn't work for you, too bad. Most people would call it "appreciating the situation and acting accordingly". You, however felt it was "being monitored like a child". Guess it just depends on how you look at things.

[rwbradley]

DarthMuffin wrote:

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.

I agree
There is actually an option for smaller campgrounds to improve their WiFi network. It does not address the internet bandwidth issue but will address the entire internal network capacity issues.
Small campgrounds who really want to improve things please listen up!
If you can cover your campground with 5 Wireless Access Points, than this will work for you. I am not selling a particular brand, just very familiar with it, but other brands may possibly offer similar solutions. For about $3000 upfront with no yearly maintenance costs (unless you want it) a small campground could build a network with a Router/Firewall and 5 Access Points that will perform like the best enterprise solutions out there.
With:
A Fortinet 60D Small Business Firewall/Router will give the ability to sustain high traffic loads with stability, protect the network from hackers, allow you to use Quality of Service to segment the traffic into multiple flows ie high priority for business traffic, medium priority for general surfing and low priority for Netflix, youtube etc. There would be no need to reboot every day. The Netflix users will not bring the network down, they will only get whatever traffic "scraps" are left over leaving the rest of the network fast and rock solid.
Add 5 FortiAP Access Points (no additional licensing for the first 5) and you will add on an enterprise grade 802.11N wireless mesh network (not repeaters). The Access Points will be stable and able to handle high traffic loads and up to about 100 devices per access point. They can also prioritize traffic. You will also be able to segment the public traffic from the business traffic. They will be able to dynamically adjust signal strength in the event of a Access Point outage, or dynamically shift load around to other Access Points if one gets overloaded.

The only thing left would be to find a way to keep your internet feed fast enough to please the bandwidth hogs.

[wbwood]

We once went to a campground that asked us if we wanted internet access during our stay. They gave a username (site number) and a password. Then we got a lecture about not using it to watch movies, facebook and whole laundry list. She said they were on satellite internet and they had a certain amount of usage and if they went over, then they would be blocked for 24 hours and they used it for the business too. First of all, that sounded like a dumb business plan. And secondly, I told her no, that I was not going to be monitored like a child. Not that I woould of done any of that stuff, but when you start a long list of "do nots", then forget it. As others mentioned, you are not going to get internet like you do at home, at an RV Park. If you travel a good bit, then up your mobile plan and use it. We currently have 30GB of data on our plan. We are with AT&T and they offered us a special that they had for a short period. I think we had 5GB per phone before (3 phones) and then they doubled it from 15GB total to 30GB. I think it was an extra $25 or $30 a month. Not too shabby. Plus, they recently went with the roll over for the data. I think this month we started with somethign like 54GB. We are halfway through the billing cycle and have used less than 4GB of that. So we should be carrying over a good bit again.

Here's a hint. If you watch things on youtube, make sure you change the setting from HD. Watch it in a lower setting.. It will save bandwidth and will be faster for you.

[DarthMuffin]

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.

[tatest]

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.

[rwbradley]

atreis wrote:
I'd be willing to bet the issue is most often not with the WiFi, but with the brandwidth of the Internet connection itself. Get 2-3 trailers trying to stream something and a normal downstream pipe would be close to capacity.

Typically if you see poor performance in the evening and usable performance during the early morning, I would say yes it is the internet. If you are in the back of the park (far away from the main building and are seeing poor performance all the time it is almost certainly due to too much traffic relaying thru too many Wireless Access Points to get back.

[atreis]

I'd be willing to bet the issue is most often not with the WiFi, but with the brandwidth of the Internet connection itself. Get 2-3 trailers trying to stream something and a normal downstream pipe would be close to capacity.

[spoon059]

Verizon Mi-Fi with unlimited data. There is only 1 campground that we go to that doesn't have Verizon 4G service. When we are there, at the lake, I am happier WITHOUT the internet. No work emails, wife isn't inside using internet, plenty of time out on the water, snoozing in the hammock, relaxing with the friends...

[CA_Traveler]

WiFi is an important marketing and advertising aspect of CGs. If you don't have it then you lose customers. So it's added to the CG but often it's a very minimum setup as it can be costly. Apparently it's better to loser repeat customers than first time ones.

[westernrvparkow]

rwbradley wrote:

YC 1 wrote:
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.

That brings up another important factor. Aluminum RV's can act like a Faraday Cage and significantly reduce signal propagation.

Absolutely. We have found the vast majority of wifi issues are the ability of the device to send commands to the access point. A quick google search will easily find millions of pages relating to the fact that Apple and the other device makers have de-powered the wifi transmitters in their devices to increase the battery life. You might see 5 bars from my transmitters on your device, but my access point only sees a flickering single bar (or nothing at all) from your device.

[rwbradley]

YC 1 wrote:
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.

That brings up another important factor. Aluminum RV's can act like a Faraday Cage and significantly reduce signal propagation.