real WIFI at marina's

[barnakiel]

I noticed here it is all up to the load. Our marina network tends to be overloaded by all those (----) smearphones always logged in and always updating their software. Just imagine today most people do not switch them off at night either.


My way to upload fast (big and many files, video / photography for stock) is to log into a local bar once the clients are gone. I ask the waiter and she leaves the router on. I can see the bar from my boat so ...


Cheers,
b.

[RickG]

We were in Herrington Harbor North on the Chesapeake Bay for a couple of years. The OnSpot wifi was good during the week, but weekends were a mess with the big load of weekend cruisers. We kept unlimited LTE as a backup and pretty much lived on that. Out cruising, we do not even try to use marina wifi. Our onboard wifi AP points directly to the LTE hotspot.

For Puerto Rico and US Virgin Islands we use otrmobile.com. They provide $60/month unlimited wifi over the AT&T network. myislandwifi.com was great in the Bahamas; I hope they extend coverage to the Caribbean.

Cheers, RickG

[belizesailor]

Almost every marina Ive ever visited has mediocre WiFi performance at best. Coverage of the dock area is often poor too. These factors usually culminate in the need to go to a specific spot to get the best performance. You can very quickly find that spot in marinas just by looking for where all the cruisers are sitting with their devices....there is a simple metric for you! [emoji16]

One reason for this is that WiFi is typically a non-revenue producing commodity service which has become an expected aminity. So, marinas often subscribe to the lowest cost service they can get and then have dozens of users attempt to share it...obviously performance issues result, but the marina can tick the box that they have free WiFi...you get what you pay for.

A friend of mine who owned a marina had a policy of the WiFi being free, so that when people bitched he could offer them a refund. [emoji6]