How to improve WiFi in marina - any suggestions

anoccasionalyachtsman said:
The advantage of using a mifi is that it can be hoisted up a mast in a plastic bag (best with a USB cable to power it for longer periods than its internal battery allows) to boost reception in areas with poor signal. You could do the same with a 'phone, but then you can't talk on it.

As far as choosing a cheap data plan goes, use a network signal check website to make sure that the provider's network has a good signal where you're most wanting to use it.
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If your phone and laptop support bluetooth you can still talk on it.
 
My 4G hotspot gizmo (TP-Link M7200) seems to get much better reception than my iPhone, even located in the cabin - it often works when my phone can’t get any signal. I have an EE plan that lets me ‘donate’ my phone’s data allowance to the hotspot’s relatively inexpensive tariff. When on the boat I bung data to the hotspot and just use that for data.
 
anoccasionalyachtsman said:
The advantage of using a mifi is that it can be hoisted up a mast in a plastic bag (best with a USB cable to power it for longer periods than its internal battery allows) to boost reception in areas with poor signal. You could do the same with a 'phone, but then you can't talk on it.
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I avoid this by using one with an external antenna. The mifi came from the Sales forum; the antenna came from eBay for £15 or so and is good for two or three extra bars on reception.
 
MarkCX said:
My 4G hotspot gizmo (TP-Link M7200) seems to get much better reception than my iPhone, even located in the cabin - it often works when my phone can’t get any signal. I have an EE plan that lets me ‘donate’ my phone’s data allowance to the hotspot’s relatively inexpensive tariff. When on the boat I bung data to the hotspot and just use that for data.
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I like the sound of that! How do you bung the data to the hotspot - do you buy a SIM card for the hotspot and somehow transfer data to it from your iphone? Sounds like something I need to go into a phone shop to discuss (I'm with o2 Business).
 
Simple. Prevail upon the management that an aceptable level of Wifi is required and needs to be provided in this modern world, just as water and electricity is.
 
Slowboat35 said:
Simple. Prevail upon the management that an aceptable level of Wifi is required and needs to be provided in this modern world, just as water and electricity is.
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In many (most?) Marina locations, it may simply not be possible because of the cost of laying fibre to a remote, rural location. We see the same problem in small rural communities in East Anglia - our church gets rent for housing equipment on our tower to provide a microwave link to some communities that will probably not get fibre for the foreseeable future. Works fine in a flat place like the fens!
 
philipm said:
I like the sound of that! How do you bung the data to the hotspot - do you buy a SIM card for the hotspot and somehow transfer data to it from your iphone?
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That’s exactly what I do. I have a 100GB EE contract for my phone and the hotspot has a cheapish £7.50 0.5GB contract on the same account (I also do the same for 4 family members). The app allows me to ‘gift’ data to or from any of the contracts at any time. Plenty of data for all 6 accounts, saving quite a few £££. Makes me feel quite benevolent at the start of each month doling it out ?

Not sure if other networks offer the same.
 
AntarcticPilot said:
In many (most?) Marina locations, it may simply not be possible because of the cost of laying fibre to a remote, rural location. We see the same problem in small rural communities in East Anglia - our church gets rent for housing equipment on our tower to provide a microwave link to some communities that will probably not get fibre for the foreseeable future. Works fine in a flat place like the fens!
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I'm lucky, because I'm too far from the cabinet for FTTC to give me the speeds promised and subsidised by the Scottish government, so they gave me FTTP instead. BT are supposed to be decommissioning their entire copper network by 2026, so enlightenment may come to East Anglia fairly soon ...

Fibre is lovely. I ditched my copper line (Most ISPs, including BT ,do not tell you that this is an option) so I don't pay line rental for it. Just £40/month for 80Mbps. I ported my old phone number to VOIP, which means we can have multiple simultaneous calls and I can use the home phone number anywhere with an internet connection.
 
JumbleDuck said:
I'm lucky, because I'm too far from the cabinet for FTTC to give me the speeds promised and subsidised by the Scottish government, so they gave me FTTP instead. BT are supposed to be decommissioning their entire copper network by 2026, so enlightenment may come to East Anglia fairly soon ...

Fibre is lovely. I ditched my copper line (Most ISPs, including BT ,do not tell you that this is an option) so I don't pay line rental for it. Just £40/month for 80Mbps. I ported my old phone number to VOIP, which means we can have multiple simultaneous calls and I can use the home phone number anywhere with an internet connection.
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Given that our church makes a significant income from renting the space, calculated as a proportion of the traffic, I'm hopeful that it will be a while before fibre reaches the wilds of East Anglia!

In England, I think that the promise is only FTTC; that may in fact be meaningless in terms of bandwidth to final users because of the possible miles of copper between the cabinet and the user.

Seriously, we're talking about communities of a few houses that are miles from anywhere; sometimes even isolated houses. Not long ago I had to travel several miles down a road where I was in serious danger of damaging my car to reach an isolated house. Fibre isn't going to reach a house like that anytime soon, and some marinas are at least as isolated as that - for example Suffolk Yacht Haven (about 2 miles to the nearest village), and even my own marina (Titchmarsh) is over a mile from the nearest main road. I think that in many ways, East Anglia has a bigger problem than rural Scotland; the topography of Scotland means that communities occur along natural lines of communication such as valleys, but the totally artificial geography of the Fens means that there may be no such logic about the location of remoter habitations.

In my previous home, we had cable; a legacy of Maggie Thatcher's promises.. That was great, too!
 
stuartwineberg said:
Just got an r36 plus usb .aerial. All good except the marina has an unsecured network that you log onto and then open a browser to put in an access code. How do you deal with that with the R36.
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Go to any http website - not the https version; you need unsecured http:// so the wifi can redirect you to its captive portal.

To avoid caching I wrote a little shell script on my Mac, taking a random word from the dictionary (/usr/share/dict), and opening http://$word.com. My script repeated this 5 times, as the $word.com domain is invalid 80% of the time - a valid DNS result is needed before your packets can be captured by the wifi's captive portal.

On Windows you might try a shortcut on the Desktop to http://some-real-site.com and seeing if that works.
Hadenough said:
And it will be secure unlike a marina wifi
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Apart from the captive portal, all the data you transmit over the wifi will be encrypted anyway - https websites are perfectly secure, and most websites and browsers will redirect you to them. On today's systems you have to force unencrypted http to get to the captive portal.
 
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