RV FEATURE
First, consider the park wi-fi. When you arrive at, say, 2pm in the afternoon, there may be only a handful of guests there. The demands on the park’ s internet will be low, and it is possible to stream media in high definition. Once the park starts to fill up and more and more guests are logging in, checking their email or contacting family and friends, performance gets worse, and it is very likely that it will become impossible to stream anything.
A similar issue happens with mobile data. You’ ve likely seen the cell towers around towns and cities as you travel. You might notice that in large towns, they will have multiple towers, while small towns may have just one for each of the telcos. While these towers can handle a lot of data, there are limits, and as a town fills up with travellers, these towers just cannot cope, so internet performance degrades. It can be so bad that even streaming at the lowest resolutions can be a frustrating waste of time.
The Amazon Fire Stick plugs directly into your TV’ s HDMI port and USB port for power. Its perfect for caravan use, especially if your TV has issues running streaming apps.
The Google Chromecast allows you to stream content from your mobile phone to a TV. At just $ 40, its a cheap way to get streaming services onto a TV that doesn’ t support streaming apps.
In both cases, as people go to bed and stop using the internet, performance can get much better. If you’ re a night owl like me, streaming after about 10.30pm can be okay.
STREAMING DEVICES
It’ s not just the quality of the internet connection that plays a role here. The device you’ re streaming onto can make a huge difference.
Without going into a heap of technical jargon, let’ s just say that streaming movies requires considerable computing power, particularly memory, or RAM. Most mobile devices, such as mobile phones or tablets, will have plenty of power and memory to stream online media with ease, as long as the internet connection is up to speed. The problem is that most caravanners will be streaming to their 12V televisions. After all, that ' s what they are designed for, aren’ t they?
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