RV's are aluminum cans. My experience with wifi to campers and RV's has
not been positive. Outdoor coverage is easy, getting it reliably into
all the RV's is less easy.
If you don't run wires now while you can, then you'll regret it later
IMO. Ideally do both, there will be people who don't have a router and
only have WiFi devices as options, and there will be people who really
need it to work 100% of the time because they'll want to work out of the
RV park, and for them you'll wish you had a wired option.
Somebody is presumably trenching for water and electric to these pads,
so maybe you can lay a conduit next to the water lines while the trench
is open.
-Adam
On 5/30/2018 2:07 PM, castarritt wrote:
We were approached by a current subscriber who is building an RV park
with around ~100 pads, and he wants us to offer service to his
tenants. This isn't the typical situation where we would sell service
to the RV park, and they handle distributing it to their customers.
He wants to avoid providing wi-fi himself, and will instead let us
charge every client that wants service separately. Also, this isn't a
campground; his shortest lease term will be monthly.
While the park is under construction, he is willing to let us lay
conduit, so we could provide wired service to each pad if we wanted
to. Alternatively, we could just setup a bunch of wi-fi APs. One
potential complication is that we have a fairly busy cluster of 5g
PMP450s a couple hundred yards from this RV park, so while wired
service could be more reliable for the park tenants, the potential for
100 customer wi-fi routers we can't control operating within sight of
our PMP450 POP sounds like the stuff of nightmares.
We are leaning more towards a wi-fi option due to better control over
spectrum, as well as avoiding maintenance of 100 outdoor ethernet
ports that the customers would be plugging into, but we are open to
suggestions.
Also, assuming wi-fi is the correct answer, does anyone have any
equipment recommendations? The park is about 400' by 900'. I was
looking at either doing a whole bunch of low end APs, or maybe ~8
sectors. We haven't used any of the Cambium wi-fi gear yet, but
the cnPilot E501S looks interesting.
Thank you,
Chris Starritt
Western Broadband
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
512-257-1077
