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Wireless for RV campground

Right! Numbers are everything and the only way to tell the difference between quality and crap. Numbers are difficult to find and may be inconsistent. The best I've found are on SmallNetBuilder.com. For example, the WAN->LAN thruput for various wired and wireless routers:

For thruput, they use:

which I can't afford to buy. However, I get similar numbers using Iperf and Jperf:

Unfortunately, there are some numbers that are useless. Most router vendors don't bother supplying the measured receiver sensitivity. There are plenty of reasons for this, but I don't wanna get into minutiae. They just copy the numbers from the chipset vendor. One exception is D-Link, which has apparently actually measured their products:

Note the wide variation in values.

Demand? I recently screwed up and left the speed at one of my coffee shop customers locked at 5.5Mbits/sec (on a 3Mbit/sec DSL line). I think it was like that for at least 3 months before I noticed the problem. Absolutely nobody complained, demanded anything, or expected anything better. My customers ask me about the latest technology and buzzwords which they read in the trade magazines and online, but rarely "demand" any of them[1]. In my opinion, the trick is to supply the best that is necessary to do the job, but no more. It's the added acronyms, features, and functions that seem to cause me all the problems.

For example, some missing numbers in this exercise are:

  1. What maker and model equipment already exists?
  2. How many users per access point? How many ACTIVE users per access point?
  3. How many access points to cover the area?
  4. Any existing wireless networks in the park?
  5. Do you have line of sight to all the camp sites? If not, what's blocking the signal?
  6. Tell me about the existing CATV system? Is it owned by the campground owner or the cable company? If locally owned, is it a star or bus topology? Is star, can each leg be isolated to provide individual feed?
  7. Does the CATV coax live in conduit? If so, how big? Do you have room for gel filled CAT5? If so, you don't need or want wireless.
  8. What level of service are you planning to offer? For example, if you're going to offer 1Mbits/sec per user for 100 users with 10% loading, you'll need a dedicated 10Mbit/sec backhaul. A cable modem can do this, but there are restrictions on reselling the bandwidth.
  9. What's on the trailer/campsite hookup? Room for a built in bridge or switch?
  10. Are there any financial or budgetary limitations? There always are, but in this case, it might depend on what the campground charges for the internet access.
  11. Who's gonna adminstrate this system? With 100 potential users, you have the equivalent of a small ISP (internet service provider). You'll need all the traditional facilities normally provided by an ISP, such as billing, administration, support, traffic monitoring, abuse detection, abuse mitigation, installation, and troubleshooting. Actually, running a WISP is more difficult than a traditional ISP in that you also have a rather unreliable method of delivery. One leaky microwave oven will kill the whole system. Also, who's gonna answer the phone when a customer can't connect at 2AM?

[1] The exception are government and educational institutions. It takes so long to get funding and approval that they tend to specify technology that is well ahead of the state of the art. By the time the system is actually purchased, the specified products are usually commodity items. I recently commented on a skool system that specified 10GigE, which is currently unobtainium. They're guessing 4 years to purchase, which is about right.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann
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Enterprise class b/g/n

Reply to
LR

Very good idea! This project isn't a high priority with the campground owner, he's in no hurry. And I've been busy lately with other things, so I haven't done much with this. I'm going to try and get over there this week, to try the tests you suggested. And... to look around at what's available for conduit that's already in the ground.

Yup.... lots of good suggestions / information / discussion on this thread. I appreciate all of it. Learned a lot. As I progress on this project, I'll post back on here, to update all those that have helped on how this turned out.

Reply to
JohnB

Enterprise class price tag: $1,200 street price. About $160/year for support from Ruckus.

More a/b/g/n from Xirrus:

Prices run $5,000 to $20,000 each:

Note that all of these are dual band.

Somehow, I don't think the typical RV campground is going to buy one of these.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

a couple other major & simple questions..

1 - what does the owner expect to invest in this wifi solution ? How important ? 2 - what is the broadband connection ? 3 - has wifi been there already ? 4 - does the owner expect it to work like a single street light illuminating the area ?

The last one falls into the category of "managing expectations"

Reply to
ps56k

Reply to
Peter Pan

A campground my wife and I spend a lot of time at is about this same size and layout. They have 1 AP at the far end of the campground. Signal strength is OK even at the far end. The problem is being shield by other other RVs. My solution is to add an external antenna on a tall mast. Also there is a problem with it getting overloaded when the park is at capacity. It seems everybody and his brother wants an internet connection while camping. If I didnt have to check my email on account of work I wouldnt bother with it. They finally set up a covered area where you can sit and plug in your laptop. I think that was a great solution.

Jimmie

Reply to
JIMMIE

Enterprise class b/g/n

There ARE out there ! I stand corrected. And it's interesting possibilities with beam forming. Anyone install these yet ? Anyone spec'ing them in?

At $700 -4 1000each, if he needs three, it will only be $2100- $3000. Let's see, that will buy something like 30 -40 Nanostations.

Whereas buying two Nanos ($160) plus a $40 panel antenna for the existing rig should bring the total radio antenna cost up to $200 for G.

It comes down to this: install G, currently used by almost all outdoor hotspot applications at a cost of approx $200 (assuming three APs) or future proof by spending over ten times as much.

I suggest that by the time the owners feel any great need for N band APs, that the prices will have dropped considerably, if the market even opens up for outdoor N. Strategically, it's going to be far cheaper to upgrade at that time than to future proof now.

Install G using directional antennas/ APs. Plan to upgrade to the next viable standard (N or whatever) when that standard becomes commodity. Not worth the cost to be on leading edge.

Reply to
seaweedsl

You would probably need to ask on the wisp forum at dslreports.

A couple of people seem to have them but not deployed them as yet e.g WiFi35

Reply to
LR

Thanks for the heads up, it's nice to know what's out there. I lurk over at that forum once in a while, so my question was somewhat rhetorical.

Steve

Reply to
seaweedsl

I frequently lurk there to see what people are using and since the quantity of the items they use can be high you get a better picture of the actual performance of the equipment. This one on the PS2 was interesting.

Reply to
LR

I almost lost my lunch when I saw the photo of the antenna:

That geometry just can't work. Reading through the rest of the article, it seems that most eveyone agrees that it's a bad design. There's also a comment from "UBNTMike" which reeks of damage control:

That was all from late 2007. Has the antenna been redesigned for the PowerStation 2?

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

I don't know. The discussion seems to be about the 18dB Panel antenna model and I haven't seen anything which confirms a redesign. When the threads stopped on dslreports I browsed the Ubiquiti forums and there was nothing to confirm it had been redesigned but they did introduce the PS2-17D with the dual polarity antenna as an option.

rewists on this one mentioned having the 18v and the original PS2 18.

At the time I did try to find an FCC ID for the PS2 to see if there were any changes registered but looking at my notes I evidently didn't find it. The Ubiquiti products I could find on the FCC site have a prefix SWX- although I had some confusion over the "Bullets".

Reply to
LR

I found out that the owner of the campground had been talking to the cable TV provider at the campground. And they are working on a wired solution, to each site, using the CATV infrastructure. He was very secretive about the whole thing, so I'm not real impressed with them. I'll probably hear from them again, a year from now, wanting to talk about a wireless solution again.

A campground my wife and I spend a lot of time at is about this same size and layout. They have 1 AP at the far end of the campground. Signal strength is OK even at the far end. The problem is being shield by other other RVs. My solution is to add an external antenna on a tall mast. Also there is a problem with it getting overloaded when the park is at capacity. It seems everybody and his brother wants an internet connection while camping. If I didnt have to check my email on account of work I wouldnt bother with it. They finally set up a covered area where you can sit and plug in your laptop. I think that was a great solution.

Jimmie

Reply to
JohnB

Oh well, as least it stimulated a lot of discussion !

Reply to
seaweedsl

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