Welcome back to Travelers Rest and another season of OnMouseClick technology columns. This season begins with a topic that I expect is on the minds of many TR residents — the new TRWIFI.
As most of you know, last spring the Board made a pledge to replace the existing wifi system. They entered into a contract with Bright House Networks that promised to meet all the wifi needs of Travelers Rest residents and visitors — even streaming. Over the summer, manager Rick Lindquist kept residents up-to-date on the progress of the installation through the Summer Updates, and in the October Summer Update, he anticipated the service would be both operational and useable by October 31.
We arrived at our house in the Village on November 9, and with high hopes we attempted to log on to TRRWIFI. Initially it did not show up on any of our devices (a PC laptop, a MacBook Pro, two iPads and two iPhones). It finally appeared on my iPad and worked for about ten minutes, when it again disappeared. We learned from our neighbor that the signal was not strong enough for most of the Village homes, and that Bright House was continuing to work on a fix. As a consistent internet connection is a requirement and not a luxury for Eddie and I, we thus called Centurylink and turned on our DSL line.
As I began writing this article on Tuesday, November 17, I again tried the TRRWIFI network at our house. My iPad picked it up flawlessly. I walked around the entire house, inside and out, while streaming a video. However, neither of our laptop computers were able to use the network. Both were able to sign on to TRRWIFI, but neither could download webpages, raising questions that will take some research to answer.
I was curious about the speed of the network connection on my iPad, and I used a program SPEEDTEST to preform this test. Network transmissions are measured in megabits per second (a megabit is 1 million bits, the smallest unit of information), or Mbps. An average of three tests showed the TRRWIFI download speed at 6.88 Mbps which is only slightly lower than the average DSL download speeds of 9 Mbps. The next day I again connected the TRRWIFI to my iPad, and the download speed was significantly slower — less than 3 Mbps. I do not know if the rest of the park is having similar problems, but in the Village we can safely say that as of November 18 the Bright House network is not ready for prime time. I will continue to monitor the network, and OnMouseClick will continue to feature updates on the status of TRRWIF over the next few months. If any of the TR Times readers would like to share their experience with the new TRRWIFI, good or bad, please send me an email at onmouseclick@digitalquinn.com.
On a related topic, a concern I had about the new Bright House Network was its security. It is true that it is not an open network, and you need an access code to sign on, but there was still a concern about using a shared network for online banking and shopping. Over the summer I queried Rick Lindquist about this, and he in turn spoke with the engineers at Bright House. In simple terms, the answer was that the system is configured in such a way that each user’s session is unique, and transmitted data cannot be view by anyone else on the network. This put to rest my concerns about security, and I still have high hopes that this network will begin work for all our needs over the coming months.
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