Every September we get some version of the same call. A campground or marina owner has just come off a season of guests complaining about the Wi-Fi, and they want it sorted before the gates open again in May.
September and October are the right time to have that conversation. Sites are emptying out, the store is quiet, and a trencher can still get in the ground before the frost does.
Why a campground is harder than a house
A house is a few thousand square feet of drywall with one family on the network. A campground is twenty or thirty acres with trees, aluminum trailers, a hill or two, and a few hundred phones that all wake up at once on a Friday night.
Two things break most of the setups we get called out to look at. The first is distance: a router in the office was never going to reach site 84. The second is density. One access point holds a couple of hundred clients on paper, but when they are all streaming video at 9pm on a long weekend Saturday, airtime runs out long before the client count does.
Trees are the quiet problem. Wet leaves soak up 5 GHz signal, so a link that tested beautifully in April can be limping by July once the canopy fills in. We plan for the worst case, not for the day we happened to be standing there with a laptop.
The wired backbone comes first
Wireless is the last step, not the first. The parts that decide whether the system works are the ones nobody sees: conduit, fibre between buildings, and Ethernet from a switch out to each access point.
On a typical property that means fibre from the office to the comfort station, the store and the gatehouse, then Cat6 or Cat6A from a small switch in each of those buildings out to the access points nearby. Copper Ethernet is good for 100 metres, so your building layout and fibre path decide where an access point can realistically live. We would rather add one more weatherproof enclosure than stretch a run and hope.
Every outdoor run needs surge protection at both ends. A campground is a field full of tall metal poles, which is exactly the environment where a nearby strike sends a spike down a cable and takes out a switch port. Our post on surge protection for network gear covers the parts we use. It is cheap next to replacing a switch and six access points in June.
Power is the other thing people underestimate. Outdoor access points draw more than indoor ones, and a switch that looks fine on the spec sheet can run out of PoE budget once you add cameras and a gate controller to the same closet. We size that up front, and our guide to PoE budgets explains how the math works.
Choosing outdoor access points
For most Ontario properties we are picking between two UniFi models.
The U7 Outdoor has a built-in directional antenna and is rated from -30 to 60 degrees Celsius, which matters here because the gear stays mounted all winter. It runs on PoE+ at roughly 19W and carries an IPX6 weather rating. It is the workhorse for aiming coverage down a row of sites or across a basin of slips.
The U7 Pro Outdoor is the tougher, higher-capacity option with an IP67 rating and 6 GHz support. Outdoor 6 GHz at standard power in Canada falls under ISED's licence-exempt framework and depends on automatic frequency coordination, so we do not build a coverage plan that assumes it. We design on 5 GHz and treat 6 GHz as extra capacity where it works.
Marinas have their own quirk. Salt is not a problem on Lake Erie, but spray, ice and flexing docks are, so mounting height and cable dressing matter more than the model number.
How many you need is the question everyone asks first and it is the hardest one to answer from a desk. Our post on how many access points you need walks through the logic, and for a property this size we do a Wi-Fi site survey rather than guess.
Guest access you can actually manage
Once coverage is right, the network still has to be run like a business.
That means a captive portal with vouchers or site-number logins so you know who is on, per-device speed limits so one guest downloading a game does not flatten the park, and proper isolation so the guest network cannot see your point of sale, your office computers or your cameras. Those belong on separate VLANs with their own rules. We go through the setup we use in guest Wi-Fi done right.
Be honest in your marketing, too. "Wi-Fi at every site, good for browsing and streaming on one or two devices" keeps more guests happy than "free high-speed internet" followed by a bad review in August.
What it costs and how we scope it
We quote every job in writing before any work starts, but here are the anchors.
A Wi-Fi site survey starts at $395 and is the first thing we do on a property of any size. A full network audit of what you already have runs $495. Installed cable drops start at $195 for Cat6 and $245 for Cat6A. Technician labour is $150 an hour ($135 for UniFi Care clients).
For properties outside our Norfolk home zone, visits 31 to 60 minutes out start at a $395 minimum and 60 minutes or more out at $595. That is a visit minimum the labour on that visit counts toward, not an add-on; parts and equipment are billed on top. Close to home in Norfolk there is no minimum.
Seasonal businesses often want someone watching the system while they are busy running the park, which is what our UniFi managed service plans cover, starting at $325 a month.
Book the digging for this fall
The properties that had a good season this year are the ones where the cable went in the previous October. If you run a campground, marina, trailer park or resort anywhere in our service area, get in touch now and we will walk the site while the weather still cooperates.
Contact us and we will put together a written scope and quote for spring.
Sources
- UniFi U7 Outdoor technical specifications
- UniFi Outdoor WiFi Access Points
- ISED: Decision on the Technical and Policy Framework for Licence-Exempt Use in the 6 GHz Band
- Ubiquiti Help Center: UniFi Hotspots and Captive Portals
Cabling, networks, cameras, access control, smart homes, hosting and software for homes and small business across Southwestern Ontario. Twenty-plus years in the trade, and we still answer the phone.