Yachting and Boating World forums: hotspot services in marinas

Without any experience of Oceanwave WiFi other than I can connect to it from my berth in Poole to the Oceanwave setup in the Dophin (Poole Quay) marina nearly a mile away, although I haven't gone beyond their request for payment page when I saw what they wanted! Anyway we have free WiFi for members where we berth.

However, some general comments as we use WiFi a lot when cruising.

Firstly marine WiFi isn't like it is in airports and the like, if you expect to hook up using built in WiFi on a laptop below decks you will be very lucky! Add an external plug in USB WiFi adapter with an extension lead so it can be put outside and you will see much better results. We use either a small (£20) Belkin plug in WiFi stick that is on a little stand and put that up under the sprayhood or better still a (£50) Hawking miniature satellite dish job (dish only about 3" dia) that is directional and also sits under the hood. With the Hawking dish antenna we can pick up 18 signals at home and 12 from our marina berth, including PAYG ones from each of the two neighbouring marinas. We can connect to Yarmouth's set-up (again I stopped when I saw the price) from the buoys outside the harbour and both Berthon and Lymington Yachthaven's from the visitor buoys in Lymington.

Getting a signal from the base station is just one part of the equation because the communication has to be 2-way for it to work and the returning signal from you may be lower power and hundreds of metal masts in the way do not help. Even if you are connected, if lots of others are on-line at the same time then again it might be difficult.

The Netabord WiFi in France is excellent. Like Oceanwave over here if you buy time it can be used at all their other sites around the French coast. The big difference with Netabord however is the charging structure. Oceanwave I believe charge £5 per day or £100pa, but the £5 is for a calendar day. Netabord on the other hand do a 14 euro deal that is for 24 hours of time over up to 60 days and moreover allow you to connect to Meteo France for weather information free, no need to either register or log-on. We usually buy 14 euros worth on our first X-Channel trip of the year and it usually lasts us for our holiday as well or at worst we need just one more the same, and we use the WiFi a lot over there - just remember to log-off when it isn't actively in use.

Dartmouth (Blackspot) WiFi, run by Pragmatist and Pessimist of this parish is also good but with an add-on rather than built-in WiFi for best results. I think they even used to keep a couple of plug-in gizmos handy on their boat to sell/lend to visitors having difficulty, assuming they were on board of course.

'Free' WiFi is still on air out there depending on how you feel morally about piggy-backing an unencrypted user. Not for me to comment, except that it is a simple matter for the owner of the site to prevent unauthorised access if they wish. The publicised cases of 'theft of WiFi' are I think related to someone being caught parked outside a home and using a laptop day after day, not to 5 minutes of checking e-mails and forecasts from half a mile away up river from an anchorage. In any case I believe that a weak signal will always lose out to a strong one if more than one user is connected so the owner would doubtfully ever notice. That is not an encouragement BTW to folks to poach WiFi, just observations.

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Sermons from my pulpit are with tongue firmly in cheek and come with no warranty!