What Does Campground Power and Data Infrastructure Require?

The infrastructure plan starts with routing: I lay out the main corridors from the service entrance and internet demarcation across the property, following roads and paths to minimize trenching through finished landscape. Electrical feeders and data conduits share these corridors in a designed cross-section — power at its depth, data separated per code, pull boxes at intervals that make future pulls possible. I oversize the data conduit and add spare conduits, because bandwidth needs only grow and the trench is open once. Every pull box and handhole gets mapped and labeled; a decade from now, someone will thank the designer who documented the underground.

I build a capacity model from the site count: occupied sites times devices per site times realistic simultaneous use, with video streaming as the dominant load. The internet service and backhaul get sized to that peak with growth headroom, and the network architecture segments traffic — guest Wi-Fi separate from operations, point-of-sale, and security cameras. Access point placement comes from coverage modeling that accounts for terrain, trees, and building materials; I verify with a post-installation survey and adjust. Controllers and core switches live in a proper network closet with conditioned power, cooling, and physical security — not a shelf in the maintenance shed.

I commission the infrastructure like a small campus: electrical tested per standard practice, then the network load-tested with simulated peak traffic while I measure throughput at the farthest sites. Failover gets tested — I kill the power briefly and confirm the UPS-backed core stays up. The operator gets network documentation, admin credentials in a sealed handoff, and the reboot procedures for every device. Monitoring gets verified to actually alert on failures. Here is the checklist I hand campground developers.

• Design power and data as one project with shared, separated, documented trench corridors
• Model data capacity for the evening streaming peak and size backhaul with headroom
• Place access points by coverage modeling and verify with a post-install survey
• Segment guest, operations, and security traffic with proper network architecture
• Back up the network core on UPS and prove it rides through power events