ParrotBill
Yo ho, yo ho, a parrot's life for me
- Joined
- Feb 10, 2005
- Messages
- 3,179
Thought I would give an update after using Wi-Fi a lot the last 2 weeks at all 4 parks, and Kidani Village at AKL, and at Beach Club Villas and around these resorts.
Overall, I give it an 7 out of 10 for performance and reliability. It needs improvement and it may still see performance issues as more and more people use it.
Coverage was excellent all around the resorts, in rooms and public areas, with only a few noticeable poor coverage areas. Even the bus stops are covered.
You could tell that evenings at resorts are heavy use times, that's the worst time for performance. During the day, such as a few days when I had to work, it was great.
The only issue we had was with our iPods. My wife had an iPhone which stayed connected to the cellular data network. My daughter and I had iPods and frequent use means locking it and putting it in your pocket, then getting it out again. Locking an iPod disconnects it from Wi-Fi.. so every time you get it out you must wait for it to reconnect. Sometimes that was quick, sometimes it took 1-2 minutes, and sometimes it was stuck and you needed to turn Wi-Fi off and back on to get in.
In addition, if you leave MyDisneyExperience running, it would get stuck at the loss of the connection. I often had to kill and restart it - not many people know how to do this (double tap your main button, press and hold an application to start them vibrating, then tap the "-" sign to close the app.)
I also have some tools on my PC for analyzing wireless networks. I did notice that at BCV they laid out their access point frequencies with too many adjacent on the same channel (frequency.) That will cause performance to degrade. They need to interleave their channels better. But that is easily fixed.
It was great to use My Disney Experience in the parks to see wait times and fastpass return times... reduced my running around a lot and helped direct us to places with decent wait times.
Overall, I give it an 7 out of 10 for performance and reliability. It needs improvement and it may still see performance issues as more and more people use it.
Coverage was excellent all around the resorts, in rooms and public areas, with only a few noticeable poor coverage areas. Even the bus stops are covered.
You could tell that evenings at resorts are heavy use times, that's the worst time for performance. During the day, such as a few days when I had to work, it was great.
The only issue we had was with our iPods. My wife had an iPhone which stayed connected to the cellular data network. My daughter and I had iPods and frequent use means locking it and putting it in your pocket, then getting it out again. Locking an iPod disconnects it from Wi-Fi.. so every time you get it out you must wait for it to reconnect. Sometimes that was quick, sometimes it took 1-2 minutes, and sometimes it was stuck and you needed to turn Wi-Fi off and back on to get in.
In addition, if you leave MyDisneyExperience running, it would get stuck at the loss of the connection. I often had to kill and restart it - not many people know how to do this (double tap your main button, press and hold an application to start them vibrating, then tap the "-" sign to close the app.)
I also have some tools on my PC for analyzing wireless networks. I did notice that at BCV they laid out their access point frequencies with too many adjacent on the same channel (frequency.) That will cause performance to degrade. They need to interleave their channels better. But that is easily fixed.
It was great to use My Disney Experience in the parks to see wait times and fastpass return times... reduced my running around a lot and helped direct us to places with decent wait times.
.
