I mostly agree with this and have worked in IT for over 30 years.
I was thinking about this topic this AM most hotels offer wifi and in most cases it works reasonably. I would not say tv streaming quality but working from the road many years in sales i would say good enough for business. In contrary most campgrounds i would say during the same period have had wifi in most cases not hardly good enough to even check email. I can say this because we travel partly in the motorhome for business and partly in hotels for the last 7 years.
Recently we have modified our travel schedule to be 95% travel in the motorhome with this decision we knew being connected was critical to being able to do this. So we started testing many options, Phones, hotspots, campgrounds using booster technology(mostly because we always here we have good service your computer just cannot connect because it is too far to reach the antenna), mobely and recently ubifi. Since being connected was very important i wasted a lot of money on different tech items that worked or did not.
Campground wifi:
1. Rarely works well and is always impacted by other people in the campground. I generally would say i see the repeaters and equipment most use and frankly we use the same things in an office they are trying to use this equipment to support 30+- sites per point in office setting when we hit 10-12 we push the equipment over what it can real life handle. This equipment is not cheap and requires constant maintenance especially when pushed to the max limits. This is why most office setting still prefer wired connections.
2. Campgrounds generally are not managed by IT related folks and the overall cost in remote locations makes things even more prohibitive.
3. A lot have fiber available and have it making that available through out a large open area is not easy and keeping it working is even worse.
4. For campgrounds to have a good solutions i believe dedicated IT companys will need to setup and maintain the wifi systems again this will involve cost and may or may not be prohibitive
5. I do not think wifi in these places will be a real option for at least 3-5 years down the road imo
So since we ruled out wifi we started the mobile net route.
Most of the phone services we have had fall into three services Tmobile, verizon, and AT&T.
We tested Tmobile for about a year unlike many reporting here we had little trouble connecting, i actually thought we would move our phone services to them but ran into a snag that has nothing to do with the conversation but related to text messaging related to what i do for a living. Making us hold off on this.
Tmobile internet was never the best or fastest but generally would have meet the needs of what we needed mostly in the 5-10meg speeds.
Verizon mostly works everywhere except one local state recreation area where we boat it actually works as far as phone and text but the connection is 1x and has been that way for years. FYI tmobile and AT&T have 4g available at exactly the same spot. This item alone for us is important as we visit this location often it is close to home and is our recharge ourselves locations.
AT&T works about the same as verizon except one very important location my house.....Tmobile and Verizon both work great. AT&T will work with an external antenna or is you step outside my house inside is like 1 bar on and off. So having AT&T for phone service in my house is not going to work.
This put us into the hybrid solutions
1.We maintain Verizon for our phone services and one phone has unlimited which we rarely use
2. We have a wilson (prior version) like weeboost booster with external antenna
3. Internet we have mobely and it works great in most cases but a couple of items that cause me concern the limited number of connections, i have used a router in conjunction with it but kinda of a hassle and the what if they limit the connection after x amount. Now we have never ran into a situation that they have limited but they hung over us for a year. The other item is mobely has a very limited interface which band it decides to connect too is up to it. The lake was a very specific location where 700mhz is better connection but does not have an available bandwidth where as 1900mhz much faster. It would jump bank and forth without any reason
4. Recently last 2 months we added ubifi actually looking at replacing our home service and just using ubifi it is more or less the same as mobely but cost more and had not limits. The device it works with gave me the exra control more connections without having to hassle with things.
That is our story and why we have what we have
Quote:
Originally Posted by docj
It's all too easy for CG's to use this excuse without ever exploring their options. We've stayed at plenty of parks in the vicinity of metro areas where T3 lines, among other solutions, would be readily available. As for rural parks, a friend of mine owns an RV park in very rural SD and this year he was able to connect to fiber optic lines!
As for whether or not the cost would be affordable, a park with ~100 sites has 3,000 "site nights" available per month. Assuming a 50% occupancy factor, that's 1,500 customer-nights over which to spread the cost of improved wifi. A few dollar fee per night would result in quite a bit of money available for wifi.
If park owners are reluctant to increase overall rates, there's no reason why they can't make high speed wifi an extra cost option. Maybe a park with 100 sites has 15-20 high speed "slots" available at ~$10/night. I bet there would be lots of takers. It's quite feasible to set up wifi "channels" with bandwidth limits so that customers wouldn't infringe on the bandwidth of others.
Lastly, park owners could consider how much they spend on cable TV systems when more and more of their customers would prefer to stream their video or watch OTA HDTV. Apply the money now being spent on cable to better wifi.
Having interacted with hundreds of RV park owners at trade shows over the past year, I am hopeful that the younger generation of RV park owners, many of whom are taking over their businesses from aging parents, are bringing new attitudes towards this issue. Hopefully, the next few years will see real changes in the industry with respect to wifi.
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