Commercial Businesses In NP

The friendliest place on the web for anyone with an RV or an interest in RVing!
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.
See posts with no answers
I spent many years living in the National Parks and Wifi was never a problem. I never used the Wifi in the campgrounds. I would go to the hotels or the restaurants and almost always found a great connection. I was taking a lot of photos and uploading a lot of photos to the web. If you can't find Wifi then you aren't looking very hard.
 
My gripe is not about wifi, but more about cell service, there is no reason why there should be great cell service on the highways going into the national parks, just for the the parks themselves to be cell dead zones.  Many people these days need to stay in contact with the world even while on vacation, there is no reason why the parks should not have cell coverage with appropriately concealed and obscure antennas.  Now I know some people want to get away from cell phones when on vacation, but these people can simply turn them off, there is no reason they should force the rest of us to be without cell service.  As to the rest of it, I see nothing wrong with commercializing the campgrounds, so many of the national park campgrounds are built where only the smallest RV's will fit, these same campgrounds are also generally dry camping only, when many COE, state parks etc, at least offer water and electric hookups, ...

Imagine what commercialization could bring to the parks, campgrounds where the nearest shower and laundry room is not 1/2 mile from your camp site, maybe even running water and electricity, competitively priced groceries that are not double the price of groceries in the nearest town outside the park, ....
 
Just got back from 2 1/2 weeks in Death Valley NP. It is almost a dead zone with extremely limited cell voice and messaging. A few times I randomly got my email to load overnight, but that was it. The Furnace Creek resort group has updated their private WiFi, but it costs $10.95 a day per device, and no tethering/hot spot allowed. It was screaming fast, but it was only available very near their buildings, which were a few blocks away from the campground. Inconvenient and expensive, but I still used it a few times.

I really do want cell and text message service at least. I would be more than willing to pay for internet if it was convenient. There is a big difference between putting away your phone for a couple of days on a weekend and being without it for weeks! I assume the reason many NPs have limited service is because surrounding land is protected from construction needed for cell towers. It is hard to marry protection and destruction. Maybe the small satellite internet providers will take off.
 
The Internet has coverage maps for all the US carriers. If having cell phone service is that important to you then you should only go camping in places that have service. There are thousands of places to camp in the US so it should be easy to find a campground with cell phone service.
 
;D ;D ;D
This is an old school, middle school, new school debate.  Nobody gonna agree  8)
;D ;D ;D
 
  One of the best times I had was at a Georgia state park in the middle of the Okefenokee swamp, after three days of getting used to no TV, cell service or computer I learned to walk again, look at trees and birds and things. It was 14 miles back to town and the camp store didnt even have a loaf of bread, lots of twinkies and chips but no bread. We made biscuits from scratch and had the best time ever, the sky so dark you could see the stars for a change.
 
There is reasons why there is no cell phone coverage in the middle of parks. Take Yosemite for example. There is great cell phone reception in the Valley and the vast majority of visitors never get out of the valley. Yosemite is 1200 square miles, larger than Rhode Island and there is very few visitors there. It would cost a fortune to get cell phone coverage over the whole park and very few people would use it. Sure it would be nice but it is cost prohibitive. The parks would not pay for the towers, the carriers would and you would have a hard time convincing them of the need for coverage that would be used so infrequently. So the problem is money, not building and hiding them or installing them. Almost all of the National Parks are large wilderness areas. Most are very inaccessible and a very small population, if any.
 
catblaster said:
  One of the best times I had was at a Georgia state park in the middle of the Okefenokee swamp, after three days of getting used to no TV, cell service or computer I learned to walk again, look at trees and birds and things. It was 14 miles back to town and the camp store didnt even have a loaf of bread, lots of twinkies and chips but no bread. We made biscuits from scratch and had the best time ever, the sky so dark you could see the stars for a change.
Click to expand...

I agree.  This past June & July we volunteered camp hosted in Lake Owyhee State Park in SE Oregon.  It is a remote wilderness state park with no cell or internet service for 30-miles and we loved every minute of it.
 
Wilderness, WIFI, or something in between - pick where you park.

Choice is a good thing!  ;D ;D ;D
 
According to most people on these forums, you have a hard time getting a spot at most NPs. If they are already full, what is the problem. Keeping National Parks more rustic is the goal I would have thought. If you want to park a 45 ft rv, with full services, and wifi, go to a private park. If someone cant go a few days of "roughing" it, camp somewhere else. You can still visit, and see all the same sights. I think all National Parks should cater only to small campers, and rvs, with little or no services. State Parks are a different story, and each state can decide what they want to do at their parks. These National Parks are usually on some very unique ground, and are to be preserved for future generations in their natural state as much as possible. This doesn't mean you cant ever fix anything. It also means they don't need restaurants and hotels with all the amenities to keep them current. Im Canadian, so I know these aren't MY National Parks, but our Canadian ones are basically the exact same. I feel the same about them. We were at Mount Washington this summer. It is a National Forest that they have let out to private enterprise to manage. They wanted almost $60 to drive up the hill to the summit with four people in the car. In comparison, we were at Acadia NP the week before. No private management. $32 for a week pass for a carload. Private management means for profit. The prices will rise considerably. Most of the difference will go into some rich companies pockets.
 
Isaac-1 said:
I see this mostly as a good thing, there is no reason that the food, lodging, etc. inside national parks needs to look like they are inspired by a 1950's hospital.  Cell coverage, is also a good thing, if done so that the towers don't interfere with the natural scenery.

There is no reason that a  visit to a national park needs to mean lack of cell phone coverage, or $6 per slice frozen pizza being served in a dining room full of 1970's furniture.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I like the comment: Towers shouldn't interfere with the scenery.  I vote to put towers underground.

What I really wish would happen:

Get rid of cell phones, bring back phone booths and driver's education in high school, and maps, and elementary school 4th grade classes where you actually learned how to read a map.

Shoo!
 
Anyone who visited the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs 50 years ago can see what happens when over development happens. Its more like a city park now.
 
You just design the cell phone towers to look like a 1950's era ranger fire towers, and no one would be the wiser.
 
As someone that has lived inside a NP, (Yellowstone for 10 years), it cracks me up to read all this.  We had small circles of cell coverage near the focal points in the park, the miles and miles of roads through the park were devoid of any coverage.  Wifi did not exist.  The did have it in the lobby of the one hotel at Old Faithful and it was expensive.  I would hear all kinds of opinions, like we have seen here.  For those that don't want the park to have coverage, turn off your electronics.  Easy.  How about the the employees who depend upon the coverage to have phone service, to have internet to stay in touch with families?  To do banking and bill paying. 

However, we have armchair purists who deem it necessary to preserve some sort of wildness. 

As to not looking very well at finding it?  If it is not there it is not there.  Some lobbies may have it for guests, and the folks that figure it out and use it.  A one point Snow Lodge had free wifi in the lobby, but the employees who had crappy service in the dorms, would gather in the lobby as well as non-guest folks who found it, and they swamped the lobby and the bandwidth.  Hence the expensive fees now to use it.

Wifi all over?  Nah, but decent cell service with bandwidth.  While I lived there I had Hughesnet installed where we lived just so I had a reliable (relatively)  connection.

So argue it all you want. 

How about this?  Get in an accident outside the cell coverage, who you gonna call and on what. 
 
There has to be a happy medium between no amenities and wide-open commerce.  The federal gov't and the NPS haven't provided it, but neither have they demonstrated they can manage limited commercial development very well.  Perhaps too much pressure from high-powered commercial interest.

I'd love to see the NPS and Forest Service funded to improve park infrastructure without outside businesses, but Congress has ignored this need (and many others) for decades.
 
Thankfully this topic of internet coverage in the national parks likely will soon be somewhat moot with the advent of low orbit satelite internet thanks to SpaceX Starlink, One Web, etc. which will use pizza box sized flat panel antennas to deliver true low latency broadland internet over satellite within the next few years.    Starlink is expected to go live for coverage in the northern US and southern Canada by the end of 2020, and have coverage for the entire US by late 2021, or early 2022.  Details on pricing are yet to be confirmed, but are expected to be competitive with cell phone data rates.

Though this still leaves room for improvement in the way of other commercial interests, food, camp grounds,  even gas stations.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Latest posts

Members online

Total: 835 (members: 7, guests: 828)

Forum statistics

Threads
131,981
Posts
1,388,595
Members
137,727
Latest member
Davidomero
Back
Top Bottom