Bay Lake Tower Wifi

pirate33

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Aug 3, 2014
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When we stayed there last year, it was abysmal. We loved everything else about the place.

Fortunately I did not have to do much work and could make do with cellular wifi during the last trip. We will be staying there in the fall and this concern just popped in my head. Has it improved at all? Is there any list perhaps of areas or rooms that are less bad?
 
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Interesting. I have generally found all the resorts to be decent, if somewhat heavily loaded at breakfast time and evening after 8pm. Daytimes were good. Did you have trouble with performance or with drop/reconnect coverage? I like to do my work at WDW poolside :-)
 
There was a time that BLT was having issues. They found the problem from all reports. And it sounded like it was a simple one that should not have taken much time to find at all, but it did. We stayed last Oct and had no problems.
 
When we stayed there last year, it was abysmal. We loved everything else about the place.

Fortunately I did not have to do much work and could make do with cellular wifi during the last trip. We will be staying there in the fall and this concern just popped in my head. Has it improved at all? Is there any list perhaps of areas or rooms that are less bad?
BLT is our home resort, but we are usually there only twice per year at most. In my experience though, it is generally bad pretty much everywhere and hasn't improved much since Day 1. It does seem that the higher the floor, the worse it is, but that could be more because my higher floor rooms have been lake view so perhaps lake view is the issue, not higher floor? We'll be back next week and are very hopeful that service will be better wherever we end up... I'm sure someone on the boards will have more info and experience for us both!
 

There was a time that BLT was having issues. They found the problem from all reports. And it sounded like it was a simple one that should not have taken much time to find at all, but it did. We stayed last Oct and had no problems.
Interesting. We were there in late March this year and still had significant problems. Really makes me wonder if location in the building is the key factor.
 
Interesting. We were there in late March this year and still had significant problems. Really makes me wonder if location in the building is the key factor.

haha - after posting I had decided to come back and edit to add - that in general wifi at any of the resorts isn't necessarily great. Just that it generally works and BLT was working the same now as the rest.

Our last room was a TPV 2BR on a higher floor.
 
I haven't stayed there yet, but I've heard that every room has it's own router. If you're having issues, finding the router and resetting it might help.

Edit: I've also heard some try their bringing own routers, making sure that the router's antenna was screwed in properly, or buying an extended range antenna and swapping out the antenna. I don't know if these things actually work or not, though.
 
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Interesting. I have generally found all the resorts to be decent, if somewhat heavily loaded at breakfast time and evening after 8pm. Daytimes were good. Did you have trouble with performance or with drop/reconnect coverage? I like to do my work at WDW poolside :-)

You are using a different network. The rooms are served by one vendor and the common areas of the resort and parks are served by AT&T.

:earsboy: Bill
 
I haven't stayed there yet, but I've heard that every room has it's own router. If you're having issues, finding the router and resetting it might help.

We find the WiFi in the rooms to be poor. There is a router every 3rd room or so, they are usually behind the TV cabinet.

Hard to plan for the WiFi explosion. Everyone in the family seems to carry at least on device connected via WiFi and many of the applications require a lot of bandwidth.

:earsboy: Bill
 
We find the WiFi in the rooms to be poor. There is a router every 3rd room or so, they are usually behind the TV cabinet.

Hard to plan for the WiFi explosion. Everyone in the family seems to carry at least on device connected via WiFi and many of the applications require a lot of bandwidth.

:earsboy: Bill

It generally has less to do with the in building wiring - especially with the number of routers purported to be in - and the issue doesn't tend to be connecting to the network so in general they are probably ok there. Rather it tends to be the backbone. ie - either the company providing the service to WDW needs to be able to provide more capacity and can't or Disney has to pay for more capacity and won't.

The internet of things and expected personal device connections has long been on the radar for internet providers.
 
Hmm. Sounds like it is uneven. The problem we had was that the internet basically did not work the entire time. We could connect but there was really no service at all, all times of day. Time at Disney is precious so I just made do with cellular and didn't try to get it fixed because I didn't have a heavy duty need. (We had a similar problem at Aulani, also a beautiful property otherwise, and it was an exercise in frustration dealing with IT). At Aulani, I set up my own wireless extender and that helped so I will be sure to bring that along this time.

We had a theme park room on a higher floor, BTW--the side closer to the Contemporary Hotel.
 
We just got back and didn't have any issues with the wifi. However, we weren't using it a lot. My DD didn't seem to have any trouble watching all her YouTube videos.
 
We were at BLT last year and had no signal from our 16th floor villa. The cm at the front desk told us to come down to the lobby to use our devices. After telling her that was not a solution that was going to work for our party of 7, she relented and had engineering do something to fix the problem. I think they added an additional router by our villa.
 
We were their last week, based on the 5th floor. No problems. Wifi worked well.
 
I haven't stayed there yet, but I've heard that every room has it's own router. If you're having issues, finding the router and resetting it might help. Edit: I've also heard some try their bringing own routers, making sure that the router's antenna was screwed in properly, or buying an extended range antenna and swapping out the antenna. I don't know if these things actually work or not, though.

Please don't. If you have access to an access point (it's not really a router), and you reset it, you are interrupting other people's Internet access. If the Antenna is not properly tightened then yes you can tighten that clockwise to the connector. A personal access point does nothing with house wireless, but if your wired network is still working you can try to configure it to that. I used to do that before WDW had wireless. But a good network is going to block those for a good reason - you do not want a DHCP server added to your network, it can screw up service for everyone. Please don't change the antenna either. That only has to do with range and power level over the air. If you are lucky enough to have an access point in your room you already have the strongest signal. It's the person 2 doors away that is suffering. Your access point was engineered with the antenna that came with it and changing it can alter the reception for everyone.

You are using a different network. The rooms are served by one vendor and the common areas of the resort and parks are served by AT&T. :earsboy: Bill
Yup I know. That's why I go to the pool; the AT&T service is usually better during morning and evening loaded hours but not always. I know a lot about wireless network engineering and I once mapped service at The Beach Club. I found that they had poor engineering, with improper spacing of the channels assigned to the access points and overlapping channels between the common area SSID and the hotel room SSID. That causes interference and where there is interference nobody gets good performance.

If you get a lot of disconnect/reconnect events for the Wireless network, and the signal strength is medium or stronger, put in a report about that. It can be fixed.
If you simply get slow performance or problems with applications, but stay connected, that's probably overloading and nothing to be done but try switching to common area or wait until later and less loaded conditions.
If your signal strength is weak, in your room, put in a report. it won't likely get fixed during your stay but you might help out others in the future.
Installing a Wifi finder with signal strength monitoring can help because you can see how small movements, like going near a window or a different side of your room, might help you.
 
Internet access at BLT was "passable" when I was just there in early June. It was not good...I would not stream video over it. I was able to read my e-mail...browse the web...basic stuff. I always just used my cell phone and tethered it to my laptop and I found that to be a much better solution to getting fast internet. T-Mobile has pretty fast speeds at WDW and Bay Lake Tower.

I have also stayed in plenty of other WDW/DVC resorts, and the wifi in every other resort i've stayed in was "good". BLT has it's own specific issue. Most likely, the backhaul that connects the building to the greater network/internet is insufficient or has signal issues.
 
We stayed there last August on the 8th floor. Wifi was sketchy, which was disappointing. I ended up using the hotspot on my phone a few times.
 















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