We regret to announce that Mountain Stream RV Park will be closed indefinitely due to significant damage caused by Hurricane Helene, which has washed away the campground and parts of the road. Our phone systems are currently unavailable as a result of the storm’s impact on our park, roads, and bridges. If you wish to support Mountain Stream RV Park, donations can be made through GiveSendGo. We sincerely appreciate your support and understanding during this challenging time. Updates will be made available on our website and Facebook Page. Thank you!
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Everyone is told when they check-in that we have limited bandwidth, that the Wi-Fi is good for e-mail and normal web browsing but please don’t do Netflix, streaming videos, music downloads, on-line games, etc. 98% of the folks follow this and keep their usage within reasonable amounts.
The operations center monitors the system performance and the individual usage. If someone’s usage becomes excessive, the operations center will throttle their access speed by 50%. Our system speed is fast enough that this reduction is only noticeable on movies/streaming videos or online games. E-mail and web browsing are unaffected. If the usage continues to be excessive, the operations center will again reduce the access speed by 50%. At this speed, e-mail and web browsing are noticeably slower. Performance on streaming videos and online games is poor. If the the excessive usage still continues, the speed is throttled back to dial-up speed. At this point everything becomes very slow. In extreme cases when large amounts of bandwidth are used in a short period of time (like downloading a movie or an online back-up) the operations center will cut the user off entirely.
This is what happened to the Stewarts. Their usage for the first 5 days they were here was: 316 Mb, 329 Mb, 182 Mb, 199 Mb, 165 Mb. Their usage would have been much higher had they not been throttled back. Each day the system is refreshed, and they were set back to full speed but fairly quickly had to be throttled back again. The last 2 days they were kept throttled back all day. So, yes their experience with our Wi-Fi was less than satisfactory, but the reason for this was not because the system was “weak and unreliable”.
We literally get several thousand campers in here each year and most of them use our Wi-Fi. 98% of these folks are able to do e-mail, surf the web, shop eBay, check their portfolios and more without using enough bandwidth to experience being throttled back. However, the remaining few who think they should be able to use as much as they want will end up experiencing slow connection speeds. Sorry, but that’s how it is.
We pay almost $2,000 per month to provide cable TV and Wi-Fi to our campers – at no charge. It’s very discouraging to have someone abuse these benefits and then complain that you haven’t given them more. But then, there seems to be a lot of that going on in our country now.
Site 23
“This is the most beautiful campsite that I’ve ever stayed in. The grounds are top notch, well manicured, well kept and just simply beautiful. HOWEVER, I was delibertly misled about the internet access. Their website advertises Wifi access. Knowing that cell phone service is spotty in the mountains, I called before we left to inquire about their internet access. I was told that there was access throughout the campground. WHAT I WASN’T TOLD UNTIL I DROVE ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE STATE, is that they limit you to 150 meg (yes, MEG, not Gig) of access every 24 hours AND THEY BLOCK SITES LIKE FACEBOOK, YOUTUBE and pretty much any other media streaming site. When I called the day before we left, I think that they should have shared that information with me….especially to someone who depends on 24/7 internet access. I teach online classes at two colleges and occasionally have to work while I’m on vacation. Fortunately, I didn’t have any pressing work to do over spring break, otherwise I would have had to travel down the mountain and sit in a fast food restaurant to do my work. Another thing I like to do is post vacation pictures on Facebook and I was unable to do so because they block it completely. Also, when I’m in a campground with over 40 sites and there are only three other campers there, I feel like some accomodations could have been made other than the owner bumping up my data limit by 50 meg. On two nights around 10pm or 11pm, my internet access was cut off due to me exceeding my usage limitations. I had probably gone to 10 or 15 websites researching hiking trails for the next day. Again, this was a beautiful campground, but I cannot and will not tolerate dishonesty. Because of that, we will never return to this campground even if they do improve their internet situation.” (21′ Travel Trailer 03/31 – 04/04)
We are in the mountains in the middle of the Pisgah National Forest. There’s no cell phone service here and no cable internet, DSL or T1 lines available like there is in metropolitan areas. The Wi-Fi access that we provide comes in by satellite. There are usage limits with a satellite link and if these limits are exceeded, our service is curtailed for 24 hours. We can’t increase these limits because we already have the most generous bandwidth plan HughesNet offers to business customers.
That being said, Mr. Copeland’s claim that we were “dishonest” and “deliberately mislead” him is a load of crap. We provide free Wi-Fi for our campers. The fact that he “needs” so much more bandwidth than others do and we didn’t satisfy that need does not make us dishonest or deliberately misleading. We advertise free Wi-Fi but not unlimited Wi-Fi! In any other campground up here in the mountains he would not have had ANY internet access!
Average daily usage is about 30 Mb per site. We have the system set up to cut off any user for the remainder of the day (noon to noon) when their usage exceeds 500% of the daily average. We don’t like cutting someone off, but cutting off one person is better than allowing them cause everyone to be cut off. We get a couple thousand campers in here each year and most of them use the Wi-Fi. 99% of these folks send and receive e-mail, surf the web extensively (significantly more than 10 or 15 sites), shop eBay, check their portfolios and more without using enough bandwidth to experience being cut off. However, the remaining 1% who feel they have to have unlimited bandwidth will have a problem here. Sorry, but that’s how it is.