Providing internet access to an rv park

[Tech35059]

I am in a bit of a debate with my manager as to the best way to provide internet access to our tennants.
Manager wants to offer "wifi".
Having done time with a WISP, i think that while wifi is"everywhere", getting good service inside a lot of rv's, relatively close together, with a lot of plantings (shrubs & trees) in between, will be technically very difficult. I have proposed an ethernet connection on the utility pedestal.
BUT, l have no personal experience.
I see a lot of posts where rv'ers bring their own hotspot, etc. Rv'ers, what have you seen, & how did it work (or not)?
Camp owner managers, what have you done, & what were your results?
What do you think of the "ethernet on the pedestal" idea?
Thanks for your responses ... ce

[Skip426]

Does the park already have cable TV ?

I winter at a park with OTA WiFi and you are correct about it being spotty ; even an RV parked between can interrupt the signal.

The only place with decent signal is the club house.
We spend 5 months on site and go to the cable TV provider for internet equipment .

[MRUSA14]

The standard in the industry is wifi, not ethernet. While it is generally faster and more reliable than wifi, the vast majority of RVers would not be equipped to connect to ethernet. The average RV does not have the wiring or the equipment to connect to ethernet.

There are campgrounds (a relative few) that have fast and reliable wifi, so it is possible. I don't know the cost to do so. A lot will depend on the physical layout of your park and the number of sites that need to be serviced.

I personally don't think ethernet will be sucessful unless you have "captive" campers such as in a seasonal campground where the same campers return each year for a protracted stay. In that case, it would be worth the time and expense for them to adapt their RV's to ethernet hookups. In a transient campround, it would not be worth the bother for the itinerant RVer to do so.

[dons2346]

The cost will depend on the size of the park. The more area you have to cover, the more access points needed. Then you run into bandwidth needed to support the system and cost will depend on how much you want. It just isn't checking email anymore, with people streaming movies it will require a lot. When the system goes down, get ready for complaints.


Best bet with the least headaches, is to let each tenant go their own way

[Bigceasar]

First and foremost, what type of internet service can be brought into the park? Any WiFi will be dependent on the speed of your Internet Service Provider.
In this day and age you probably shouldn’t invest a Whole lot of money in WiFi . Most people can use their cellular service to access the internet. That is usually faster, more secure and more reliable than any WiFi a park can provide.
If you are in an area without cellular services, the odds are you don’t have high speed internet available either. Using a Wisp or Starlink as you ISP is going to mean your wifi will get overloaded very quickly, they just cannot carry the traffic any wifi system in an RV park will generate when there is no cellular service since all your guests will be trying to use it.
A simple system with a few access points will work for most parks provided you don’t over promos performance or guarantee connectivity at every site.

[3pedal]

I have occasionally had good internet access at a campgroud, but not normally. It has pretty much all be wifi. If you have 50 or 100 people trying to stream at the same time, the bandwidth requirement will be substantial.



I think, if I had an RV park, I would consider putting in WiFi, but trying limit people's bandwidth, or blocking streaming. Then, they could have useable internet for everything but watching TV.

[Tech35059]

We are currently provided with a 1 gig fiber pipe to the internet.
The target market is/are longer term residents (families), those whom have opted for an rv rather than a house, or are living in an rv while house shopping or building, or people who are here for a few months ( or more ) for work. We are an "easy commute" to a major(?), growing city.

[Bigceasar]

We found WiFi to be an extremely labor Intensive amenity. There were very few things that put the fear into my staff and me more than someone coming into the office with their laptop. The number of people who didn’t have the faintest idea of how to connect to a WiFi network was amazing. Plus the nature of an RV park, Lots of metal rigs, hopefully some trees and topography makes getting good service all the sites somewhere between problematic and nearly impossible.
I have my doubts throttling or restricting streaming will work. We were very upfront with the fact our systems couldn’t accommodate streaming . Didn’t matter. People tried and complained anyway.

If WiFi is the deciding factor for a long term stay I would be very concerned you will just end up making their WiFi issues yours.

[tetranz]

I agree with many of the comments above.

When people talk about "spotty Wi-Fi", it's never quite clear if the problem is the Wi-Fi connection or the incoming bandwidth or both. You can have a nice strong signal but that doesn't help of there is not enough bandwidth.

I agree that most people wouldn't know what to do with an ethernet connection. Even if they do, it's often not easy to get another cable into the RV in a waterproof and secure way.

I think most people still want Wi-Fi so those who somehow manage to get the cable into their RV will simply plug it into a Wi-Fi router. That immediately gives them their own network with internal IP addresses behind a NAT router which also gives some security. I wouldn't want to use your connection directly and have my devices directly on the same local network as everyone else.

Once you have ethernet to every site I guess one crazy idea would be for you to put a cheap Wi-Fi router on every pedestal in a waterproof box. That's probably a maintenance nightmare.

It starts to make sense why most parks do it the usual way with multiple professional Wi-Fi hubs around the park. You just need to have enough of them. Even if it's not ideal it's hard to come up with something better.

Your idea does however does make me think that it would be nice if RVs had an external RJ-45 connection properly installed like many have a cable TV coax socket.

[m0v1]

1. Measure the 1gig WAN connection to be sure you are getting what is being sold. Use the cloudflare tool, not something like speedtest.net. Don't forget about the importance of uplink and test it many times throughout the day and night.

2. Once you know you have a reliable connection that is actually worth spending money on infrastructure to share, then determine how many WAPs you will need. As people noted, many campers are pretty well a faraday cage. Mine included being a steel body rig with screen and metallic tint over some of the multiple pane windows. The point is you may need stronger and more ubiquitous signal than you think to provide high gain signals to everyone.

There are a few ways you can go with this. It will depend on the size and shape of your park and where the best places are to power your access points. You may want to go with a few higher powered repeaters or more mesh units. Mesh may be easier to setup and be more reliable in the long term.

3. If you are going to commit to this, get the right tools, processes, and training in place. Otherwise, it will just become a source of frustration and waste of time for a lot of people.

The number of times I have used free wifi at an RV park: 0
The percentage of time I am connected to the internet with my own gear: 100%

[jaydee325]

Here is my consumer view.

RV Park WIFI has never for me been adequate. I use my own setup. Even on the rare occasion that we stay in a hotel, WIFI security risks have me using my cell phone and hotspot as needed.

Therefore, my input to campground managers all over is to not bother. It's not a selling point for me.

[Isaac-1]

Go with wifi, few RV'ers are setup for ethernet, few if any have ethernet wiring into the coaches, or their own routers. Mesh wifi is the way to go these days, with several outdoor mesh satellites around the RV park. Though all this presumes you can get enough internet bandwidth to the RV park to service all the users.

[Turbojack]

I do not know of any coaches that come wired for ethernet.

Go with a good mesh system. If you see you need to cover another area better, just add another AP. UniFi was one of the first ones doing this.

[Tech35059]

Thanks for all of the replies. Some very interesting, & attractive ( to me) proposals have come from technical advisors, but I am not the last word here. I do not know which way The park will go yet.