What would proper wifi cost a park?

[Zulu]

1 hour ago, Jack Mayer said:

I've seen parks with Internet carried on their cable system, though.

Yep, Internet via cable is essentially a "home" connection. We've been lucky to have it in our park model and on a site where we stay some summers.

If you're going to be staying for a while (ie, months) at a campground with cable, give the cable company a call and see if they'll install a cable modem.

[Tcwndsr]

We were just in a fairly small park that was looking to upgrade their system so it was more usable. I'm not talking 100% streaming here, just usable normal surfing. They were throwing out numbers in the tens of thousands of dollars, $30-50,000 minimum!!! And they weren't even sure a decent system was possible in their rural location. I don't know how a business could justify that expense without charging guests for usage.

[Chalkie]

On 12/7/2017 at 7:11 AM, Mark and Dale Bruss said:

 An ethernet can be 10 MBits/s connection and WiFi can be over 300 MBits/s.

Small correction. An ethernet connection can provide as much as 125 MB/s when run through a gigabit router and if you have sufficient speed and bandwidth coming in to the router. This is precisely why I have hardwired the TV that we do the most streaming on. The TV's on wifi will sometimes pause the show to buffer. Never happens on the hardwired TV. 

Now, back to topic, I heartily doubt that many campgrounds are going to provide the service I have in my S&B home. Perhaps we need to cheer on Elon Musk and his plans for providing internet everywhere. 

 

[Mark and Dale Bruss]

My point was that just because you have a wired Ethernet connection, there is no reason to believe you will get any more than 10 MBit/s which is highly probable in a campground.

As for satellite driven internet, there still is an issue with response time even with low earth orbit satellites.

 

[Bill Joyce]

The campground I am in supplies a cable modem for no extra charge.  When I tested it i got 10Mbs down and 2Mbs up, but under usage it slows down.  It took four hours to download the 3GB Windows 10 Fall Creators Edition update, 50% in one hour and the other 50% in the next 3 hours.  I have no expectation that a campground is going to supply me the same  intenet speeds as a home user, wired or wireless.

[docj]

1 hour ago, Bill Joyce said:

The campground I am in supplies a cable modem for no extra charge.  When I tested it i got 10Mbs down and 2Mbs up, but under usage it slows down.  It took four hours to download the 3GB Windows 10 Fall Creators Edition update, 50% in one hour and the other 50% in the next 3 hours.  I have no expectation that a campground is going to supply me the same  intenet speeds as a home user, wired or wireless.

There's quite a difference between downloading a windows update and maintaining a viewable video stream.  The video stream is a far less demanding use since an "adequate" picture doesn't require getting all the data whereas a data download must get all the data perfectly correct.  My point is that many "consumer" uses of data are actually less taxing on the network then they might at first seem.   A couple of nights ago we streamed 2 hours of video on Netflix and our total usage was <2GB.  Sure, our stream wasn't always HD quality, but it was fine for us and didn't have to pause to rebuffer once during that period. 

Parks can limit users to "channels" with fixed bandwidth as a way of managing the load.  Some customers will continue to complain, but I think most would be pleased.

[bobk3d]

They'll never find a way to give campers unlimited access to limited bandwidth. I suspect many independent campgrounds try to run it off a single cable line or some such, which can't work out. And wif-fi congestion is a whole other problem, that's shared bandwidth on a smaller scale. I bet some parks have less wifi bandwidth than upstream bandwidth.

That said, I've stayed at a few parks where they simply cap your download speed, and that seems to work well. One was at 2Mb, and that was barely adequate for streaming. Another at 3Mb was slightly better. But both of them were very reliable because they were capped. I think I stayed at a couple of KOAs that used bandwidth caps and they were also reliable, but I forget how fast.

Somewhere around 5Mb, non-HD streaming becomes practical. Since wi-fi rarely works out for me, I'm prepared to use full-time cellular, especially if I want to stream HD. But a reliable 5Mb would be welcome, and it would probably be cost-effective for the campground, and adequate for most people.

[bobk3d]

Best WiFi I ever had was at the Cracker Barrel next to Daytona Speedway. Normally the city doesn't allow overnights but it was the off-season. Had the whole speedway public WiFi to myself. Wheee.