Fair Wi-Fi will remain free in 2015
CHILLICOTHE – Campers and other attendees of this year’s Ross County Fair will be able to get their Wi-Fi service for free again in 2015, but that could change next year.
The Ross County Fair Board met earlier this week with Dusty Countryman, president of Leading Edge Integration, and Misty Tuttle, of Horizon, to discuss the possibility of charging for Wi-Fi access at this year’s fair, scheduled for Aug. 8 through 15.
Countryman, with bandwidth help from Horizon, has been working on a distribution system through which fairgoers have been able to access free Wi-Fi at the fairgrounds for the past three years to complement the Horizon hot spots.
There have been significant challenges, however. A large demand for service from a limited number of wireless hot spots, coupled with several points of interference from such things as the large number of metal campers during fair week, has created signal reliability issues that have brought complaints, despite the free offering.
“What Horizon has done for the past several years in providing the hot spots that we do — we make no bones about it — it is a 6-megabyte connection using a residential router, it’s nothing special,” Tuttle said. “When you get 150 people trying to get at 6 meg Internet off one router, it’s not going to work. We know that, and that’s what we tell people.
“You move those campers in, you just put an iron dome over this place. Also, when you get all of these people together with all of these devices in their hands and their pockets, cell service shuts down, the Wi-Fi shuts down, it’s tough.”
Tuttle said Horizon already has fiber optics in place at the fairgrounds in the form of one smaller location and in the Horizon building with 1 gigabyte of broadband Internet going to those two locations that was just “lit up” last week. That, she said, would provide Countryman with the “backbone” to distribute this year’s available bandwidth.
Countryman said that, the first year he tried to offer the Wi-Fi service, there were several problems. Each year since, he said it has gotten a bit better, even though those at the meeting who work in the fair office during fair week said they still were handling several complaints last summer.
Fairgoers had two options to try connecting last year, either through a Horizon hot spot or through a separately named “Ross County Wi-Fi” offering.
Countryman told the board he thinks the way the system has continued to develop bodes well for future success.
“I’m pretty confident in the fact that I’ve done it for the last three years, and each year, we’ve grown it,” Countryman said. “The issues that we saw the first two years, last year, I didn’t see those issues. We’ve switched equipment, Misty gave me a better connection last year, and this year, we’ve got a lot better connections. We’ve got two connections — last year, we had one master point that was feeding the whole campground, and this year, we’ve got two of those locations.”
Fair board President Brad Cosenza said that, if the board is going to put its reputation behind something, especially if it plans to charge for the service, it has to feel reasonably comfortable that it will succeed.
“That’s my biggest concern, is that we’re going to put something out there, we’re going to charge people for it and it’s not going to work,” Cosenza said.
The board decided to hold off on entering into any contract that would charge for access this year, instead approving a motion to provide the electrical hardware necessary for Countryman to proceed with testing the system at the fair and other fairgrounds events.
The motion includes a two-year contractual option that could involve charging for access starting next year depending on successful results of those tests.