Parks with the best Wifi

[Ginger_la_fey]

We work remotely, which means sometimes the typical park WiFi can leave us in a bind. I am looking for the parks you have stayed at that had excellent WiFi.
To start the thread off I recomend Austonia in Austin Texas. They also have bunnies!

[SeilerBird]

There is no answer to your question. How good a park's wifi is will depend heavily on the distance from the router, the number of people using the wifi at that moment and the quality of your receiver.

[HappyWanderer]

WiFi is at the very bottom of the list of importance at campgrounds. Right below TV reception.

[NY_Dutch]

We've found the most reliable Internet service for us has been having an AT&T hotspot and a Verizon hotspot, both with unlimited data plans. Combined with directional MiMo configured dual Yagi antennas, we've had reliable service with one or both services everywhere we've been so far. Parks with decent WiFi do exist of course, but there's not a lot of them in my experience.

[Laura & Charles]

We both have worked remote for years and so completely understand why such a list would be nice.  Unfortunately, I’m afraid that would be a very short list and too limiting to set our course by.  We just presume camp WiFi will be unusable and, like Dutch, have hotspot routers for both Verizon and ATT. We often find camp WiFi is good enough certain times of day or maybe even weekdays. But as soon as enough others get on it becomes unusable. We don’t require much bandwidth, but DO need a rock solid connection.  Our connections will drop and reconnect with just a couple of missed handshakes. That may be fine when working on spreadsheets or PowerPoint slides, not when in the middle of a national presentation.
(That said, we’ll certainly visit the bunnies at Austonia when in the area and thank you for that.)

[jymbee]

We just presume camp WiFi will be unusable

Same here. Typically I don't even bother trying to use the campground wifi. The only time we had a decent wifi was at a park outside of New Orleans where our site was less than fifty feet from the wifi tower. Even then however at peak times we would switch to hotspot data to get decent results.

[jymbee]

We've found the most reliable Internet service for us has been having an AT&T hotspot and a Verizon hotspot, both with unlimited data plans. Combined with directional MiMo configured dual Yagi antennas, we've had reliable service with one or both services everywhere we've been so far. Parks with decent WiFi do exist of course, but there's not a lot of them in my experience.

Hi Dutch-- could you elaborate a bit on how your multiple hotspots and antennas are configured? Do you just switch from one connection to the other depending on signal strength?

I remember you mentioned the Yagi previously and I'm inclined to give one of those a try myself.

[Fin27]

Yes Dutch, please elaborate.  I'm also planning to work from the road at least 50% of the time starting in January and my plan was to use my Verizon cellphone as internet (works very reliably speed wise when I've used it before) and use an AT&T hot spot as my backup.  I also assume wifi will be crap or non-existent wherever we go. 

If there are methods to boost my two connections range/speed I'm all ears.  Unreliable internet will kill my dream of working from the road. 

Thanks,

[NY_Dutch]

Hi Dutch-- could you elaborate a bit on how your multiple hotspots and antennas are configured? Do you just switch from one connection to the other depending on signal strength?

I remember you mentioned the Yagi previously and I'm inclined to give one of those a try myself.

Sure... On arrival at a new location, I check both services for signal strength using the basic omni-directional roof antennas we use while underway. Then I normally connect the dual Yagi antennas to the hotspot with the better signal. Sometimes though, if the signal is quite strong from one service already, then I'll use the Yagi pair with the lesser service so we can spread the bandwidth load better. The directional Yagi pair is mounted above our batwing OTA antenna for directional peaking. It's rare that we use the OTA antenna anyway, and coincidentally so far, the few times we have used both the TV and cell towers have been in roughly the same direction. Note in the second photo that the two red arrows are simply there to make sure a condensation drain is at the bottom and were removed on completion of the installation.

[docj]

If there are methods to boost my two connections range/speed I'm all ears.  Unreliable internet will kill my dream of working from the road. 

Dutch's methods are excellent, but one thing he doesn't mention is the use of a load balancing router to "combine" internet sources.   We stream all our video using three low-cost cellular connections plus park WiFi (when it is available).   Despite what the streaming services state are their minimum speed requirements, an acceptable picture without rebuffering can be maintained with some rather slow download speeds.

[NY_Dutch]

Dutch's methods are excellent, but one thing he doesn't mention is the use of a load balancing router to "combine" internet sources.   We stream all our video using three low-cost cellular connections plus park WiFi (when it is available).   Despite what the streaming services state are their minimum speed requirements, an acceptable picture without rebuffering can be maintained with some rather slow download speeds.

I didn't mentionload balancing, Joel, because I'm still in the process of evaluating my hardware options.

Please give us a run down of your setup? 

[jymbee]

Despite what the streaming services state...

WHOA! You're saying that the friendly, smiling Verizon rep that sold me my latest plan might have been less than transparent?!? 

But seriously, more details on your setup please! Sounds interesting.