Wi- Fi enhancers -Yes I'm new to the RV scene

AllegroD wrote:
Get your own cell hotspot.

^^^THIS^^^

Streaming takes a lot of "bandwidth" and if EVERYONE is trying to do the same thing, you ALL end up with terrible service to no usable service.

WiFi by its nature is slow, the more people you get on it, it gets even slower. It was never designed for long distances from the AP, 200-300Ft absolute max on industrial high power APs. Consumer APs 100ft is stretching it. The further you are from the AP, the less signal you have and the speed goes down as the signal gets weak.

While there are "repeaters" you can get for WiFi, PLEASE, do not get one just so you can stream video.

Campground WiFi was never meant for folks to stream unlimited video (video requires considerable amount of data), it was setup for the campers convenience to retrieve emails, perhaps light surfing but never for heavy duty video streaming.

Do everyone including yourself a favor, setup your cellphone as a "hot spot" or buy a separate dedicated hotspot.

Yes, it WILL cost you some money, but in the end YOU will be far more satisfied with the streaming results and you won't need to be worried about a host of angry campers hunting you down..

Most of the parks now pay for someone to setup their service. There is a function that most of the parks used called "Quality of Service" or QoS. It looks at the destination of the packets of information as they go in and out of the parks router.

They prioritize the packets based on what the park owner tells the person who set the system up.

If they give Netflix or other streaming services a lower QoS, then as the number of people who are at the park attempt to stream, it will get spotty.

The other issue is the locations within the parks of the Access Points (or antentta's). If they are not placed well within the park - then you won't receive the signal well and you'll have issues. A directional antenna as mentioned above will help in those situations; however, if there are too many people using the internet, you'll have a better connection but no ability to get to anything on the internet (e.g. Nexflix or Email).

Get your own cell hotspot.

The important thing to remember here is to not confuse connection speed (often limited by outbound bandwidth from the RV park to the internet) with signal strength. A booster or repeater may help a weak signal if you are located at the back of an RV park and the wifi access point antenna is at the front by the office. It will not help if the bottleneck is the outbound internet connection from the rv park to the rest of the world, which if commonly the issue.
p.s. you should use a web site like fast.com to test connection speed, you should also note that the speed will tend to vary with network congestion

I'm guessing about 20% of the parks we have visited have had usable wifi. Less than half of those have wifi you can stream with. The rest are just frustrating. So we are starting to use the download services of Youtube Premium, and other streaming sites to allow us to watch what we normally do offline. Plex would be nice, but you can only download the shows they have. Gotta have wifi to download the new shows.

There are several repeater/boosters/antenna that will improve your WiFi reception reliability, but none of them are likely to improve a usually limited park WiFi service speeds enough to accommodate TV streaming, especially when others in the park are also trying to stream. Many parks deliberately limit the available bandwidth per connection in order to allow everyone basic service and minimize bandwidth hogging. Rural parks in particular may not have sufficient bandwidth available at anything close to a reasonable cost to support multiple higher speed users. For that reason, many of us use a cell phone based data service instead for our Internet use, including streaming.

There have been several threads on this and IIRC the general recommendation was to try buying a WIFI antenna (about $15) that plugs into a USB port, assuming your device has a working USB port. Check Amazon for antennas. There are more expensive amplifiers and such but the price goes up rapidly so try the cheaper one first.