With free wireless Internet now available at select Alabama State Park campgrounds, roughing it no longer means disconnecting from the modern world. Currently Lakepoint, Gulf, Wind Creek, and Cheaha State Parks have Wi-Fi Internet in the campgrounds. Lake Guntersville, Joe Wheeler, and Oak Mountain are in the final stages of establishing their Wi-Fi systems.

The Wi-Fi network provides guests with a reliable Internet connection to enhance their visit to the parks by allowing them to stay connected with friends and family back home as well as conduct essential business such as school work, financial transactions and social media.

According to Alabama State Parks Acting Co-Director Tim Wishum, the wireless Internet program is one of the largest wide-scale Wi-Fi deployments of any United States park system. The Alabama program will provide more than 20,000 park guests with free Internet access while camping.

“We started the program at Gulf State Park in 2010,” Wishum said. “Since then we have deployed more than 600 radios, routers, and relays, utilizing 92 miles of wireless networks to provide Internet to more than 1,200 campsites.”

Rather than create a few localized “hotspots,” Alabama State Parks have turned entire campgrounds “hot” allowing guests to stay connected while in the comfort of their own RV. Since implementing the program, improvements have been made to ensure problem areas and outages are resolved quickly.

Free Wi-Fi is also available in or near the park office or store in select parks that do not have the campground systems. Those parks include Blue Springs, Monte Sano, Buck’s Pocket, Florala, Frank Jackson, Lake Lurleen and DeSoto.

For more information about Alabama State Parks, visit www.alapark.com.

BROADBAND VENDOR Virgin Media has “updated” its traffic management policy to throttle the broadband speeds of heavy data users, particularly those accessing filesharing services.

The internet service provider said that its move to “moderate” the speeds of heavy users is designed to give all of its customers the best broadband service and not “just a few”. The firm justified its policy by saying that, when someone is downloading or uploading a particularly large amount of information over a long period of time, it will slow down the broadband speeds for other users in their area who might just be checking their email or browsing the web.

“That’s why we occasionally moderate the speeds of customers who are downloading and/or uploading an unusually large amount. That way, everybody gets great speeds and all our customers stay happy,” the communications company said in a statement.

It added that at peak times it will also slow down the speed of filesharing traffic, including services like Limewire, Gnutella, Bittorrent and Usenet Newsgroup traffic. Customers will, of course, still be able to use these services, but downloads and uploads “will take longer during these peak periods”, it said.

Virgin Media explained that it will “moderate” the total volume of filesharing traffic on its network between 5pm and midnight on weekdays and midday and midnight on weekends. It said this policy, which applies to all broadband packages, will be restricted to Peer to Peer applications.

This policy does not, the company claimed, impact any applications other than Peer to Peer, so things like watching Iplayer, online gaming, making calls via Skype, downloading music tracks from Itunes or streaming music from Spotify and sending an email or normal web browsing will be unaffected.