anyone have a wifi system in place and how do you charge your residents? Did this help you add residents?
Unless you have an RV park, I wouldn’t do it. Most already have wifi, and all you’ll end up with is endless calls that it’s not working, and the profit is not large enough to make it worthwhile. We’ve looked into it before, and those were our conclusions.
I 2nd Frank on conclusions. I’ll try to dissuade you from the idea by adding some more specifics.I work in telecom high-tech and my unspoken job as an engineer is cost control. Internet subscriber access offerings are financial suicide even for the big companies. Regulated telecoms want out and can’t get out. If they can’t make it work financially, neither can you. Service bundling is how they make it work. Cost aside, support requirements and finger pointing issues are endless and will drive you to insanity. Every personal issue on a tenants laptop of computer becomes your issue or your problem regardless of the rules or arrangement. I’ve looked at that type of offering with a ‘no support’ option but your tenants will not understand or accept it. They’ll still expect support or blame you when their Internet is ‘slow’ or they have computer problems. You will hear stupid statements like ‘My computer worked until I used YOUR wifi hotspot’. You will be despised and constantly blamed. If your tenants download child porn on your free hotspot you will be spending time with the police. Everyone has a cell phone nowadays, even the poorest people, so I’m not
sure that the Wifi access is a big enough benefit anyhow. Wifi tech is
so limited in available frequency that if you had a few tenants using
Netflix (and assume you have 100), it would suck up the bandwidth for
the entire park just by having a few residents use it at once. It is an
unmanageable scenario without a helpdesk on payroll.If you have an RV park, there are third-party solutions that you can team up with which might offer support but the income is so incredibly low from Internet access, I can’t see how that would work out for a park owner. You would have to pay them for it. The best option is to have a nearby ISP’s hotspot available in your park where they manage access and support it. Unbeknowest to their customers, Comcast is beginning to sell off hotspot service from the cable modems of their existing customers so there may be nearby ISP hotspot services that you can direct customers to. The trend is catching on. Contact your ISPs in the area and see if they have any profit-sharing hotspot services and if they would be willing to have one installed in your park. If you end up with support and break even and the cost is low enough for your residents, you have found yourself a great deal.
Thank you for your time responding. I am not sure I understand what you just said about the hotspot. Are you suggesting that an ISP like the cable company in the area would have their own hotspot? Right now they charge a fortune for individual usage and there was no mention of hotspoting options from them. I do have an option to set up my own towers and they will provide the service. I do have a fair number of RV spots…I get contract workers coming in for several months at a time. I make more money per lot on them and they want wifi.
Have RV’s but have never provided Wi-Fi partly because of some of the ideas and conclusions of park investor. We have stayed clear of workers and thus our RV’ers are more affluent and have the ability to have their own hot
spot and the latest technology.
Putting in WiFi is just inviting a whole new category of hassles into your life.
hey Vicki, a hotspot is just a generic term for a wireless router with an internet service hooked up to it like a cable modem for DSL connection. If you set up your own router and an internet connection, you will be running and managing your own hotspot. Some of the Telephone/Cable companies in your area may have a business hotspot service where they come in and put in their own wireless router that they then manage for you. http://business.comcast.com/internet/business-internet/business-wifiSo since you appear to need the Wifi as customers are asking you could pick up a wireless router and purchase a consumer or business Internet package like Cable or DSL and hook it into your router. So if you can grapple with the idea of angry RV park residents demanding you fix all of their problems and get past that, your next big problem is user/password management. If you run it yourself, you will need to have a single password for the hotspot that everyone shares. That’s the easiest way to do it but your resident will eventually give out the password to everyone so you may need to change it periodically and send out a mailer or post it in the shower building. If your park is small enough you can probably get away with consumer grade stuff like a Linksys router. If you are covering a large area, you may need to mount poles and have a Wifi solution professionally done. Your best bet is to find a third-party hotspot service that will manage all of that for you AND provide economical internet service for your residents. Getting both of those is the hard part.
I too do not recommend WiFi for a MH park. I own an RV park and I use Tengo Internet. www.tengointernet.com. But we always are getting complaints- not fast enough, not able to get on etc. The guests really abuse it by trying to download movies and such.
Have you upgrated with Tengo lately? They are claiming they have new technology…I checked with an RV park that upgraded with them and they said it had improved drastically…I am skeptical but still open. I think the industry is changng. people want home experience in wifi and new technology will probably give it to them…Hey go pro is HD who would have thought of that 5 years ago…I am not sold completely…I am listening and wanting to be on the cutting edge.V
Customers at RV parks do expect a lot. I upgraded about a year ago and am not sure whether or not I have the latest and greatest or not.
Bryan, what ever you put in today is outdated tomorrow in the technology field, being on a large lake with a beach and a marina keeps our RV’ERs very happy. When buying a business try to understand at times you do not see the business clearly until your name is on the deed and or until you meet the resident the former owner disliked for good reason!