Expanding Almost Home RV Park Wi-Fi Coverage

Almost Home RV Park is a relatively small park consisting of 22 spots. The park has quite a few trees that provide shade for some of the spots but also tend to degrade or Wi-Fi signals. The park originally had an externally mounted modem that was centrally located in the park and used the modems 2.4 and 5ghz Wi-Fi. This gave extremely poor results for just about every spot in the park. The service was 300Mbps down/up but the performance for clients was only a fraction of this, typically 16 to 32Mbps if you were very close to the modem but worse as you moved away.

The park owner wanted to upgrade his internet service to Gigabit down/up but I advised that it would be practically useless since placing a modem in a central location, regardless of what speed was present at the modem, would not be accessible to the park guests. I recommended a relocation of the modem and deployment of a MESH Network throughout the park to give each section drastically improved Wi-Fi.

I chose and EAP610 Outdoor as our Root AP. The new modem was installed at the owners home and is on a UPS.  Ethernet was buried from his home to the laundry room where I placed a TL-SG2210MP. I chose this switch for its POE ability since power sources were limited. The EAP610 Outdoor was placed on the centrally located pole along with 3 POE cameras. 4 ethernet were run underground in PVC so the EAP610 Outdoor and 3 cameras could be powered by the SG2210MP. I now had Gigabit performance at the centrally located pole. I added an OC200 Controller at the switch, also powered by POE from the switch. I also installed a UPS for the SG2210MP, which provides protection and power to the switch, EAP and 3 cameras.

I then added 4 EAP225 Outdoor APs on poles around the park where I could access power for the POE. One was mounted at the front pole of the RV Park along with 3 POE cameras. I installed a POE Switch in a weatherproof box and it powered the EAP225 Outdoor and 3 POE Cameras. The pole is next to a Kiosk so I installed a battery backup at the kiosk that provices protection and power for the POE Switch and 3 cameras.

The 3 remaining EAP225 Outdoor EAPs were mounted on poles installed at strategic locations where power could be provided by a single outdoor duplex receptacle. A camera was also installed on each pole. Installing a UPS unit and POE switch was not feasible so each POE adapter and camera are powered by a receptacle at each pole.

The system has worked out well with the exception of Fast Roaming, which cannot be configured to work as desired due to a mix of static indoor devices and cell phones. Wi-Fi has worked quite well though with much faster speeds. It works well enough that the park owner dropped cable service, saving him over $600 a month, and all guests can now stream in HD. We have lost power several times but the park maintained internet and surveillance from the UPS setup. We do lose power at 3 of the remote AP locations but guests are switched over temporarily to the APs that are still active with a lesser signal but still enough that the do not even notice.

Overall we are pleased with the setup and it was not overly costly. There are alternatives we are exploring that provide more features that we desire but this has proven to work for quite well for the time being.

Parks Original Wifi Coverage with 300Mbps Modem mounted in a box on pole.

Current setup. UPS configured to maintain internet on EAP610, EAP225 at Kiosk and 7 cameras in the event of power outage.