Today’s post is brought to you by my horrible internet service in my small town. I happen to live in a very small town where no matter what internet service provider I have (I’ve had 4 now), they all end up not being able to connect very well and it gets sooooooo slow and unusable at times. Today’s bad internet day made me think of my WiFi experiences at Walt Disney World.

Disney offers free WiFi at their resort hotels and throughout the parks. You connect to the network named Disney-Guest for the parks and something like Guest WiFi (Disney) for the resort hotel rooms, and there’s no password needed.

My first experiences with their wireless internet access was in the resort hotels and it was hit or miss. I remember that depending on where our room was located, I wouldn’t be able to stay connected to their WiFi when we were in the room. Or I could only stay connected if I was in a specific spot inside the room. The only reason this even mattered to me was because there were times I took my laptop with me because I had work I was going to do for a few hours during a trip, or at one point, I had to do my class work during my trip (when I went back to college to finally finish my degree!).

So when WiFi was extended to the parks and all over Disney World, I wasn’t that optimistic about it working. I can say that I ended up finding that I could connect to the free WiFi in all of the parks a lot better than the one in the rooms. I was pleasantly surprised by this and ended up always trying to connect to the WiFi when I was in the parks.

The problem with doing this is that my phone was constantly trying to stay connected to Disney’s WiFi and my phone battery would die sooooooo quickly! And this was happening with more than one phone. One year, I had a new phone that was always notifying me about apps running something in the background. Probably most phones do this, but this was the first phone that was doing it without me setting it up. So during my first trip with this phone, I kept getting notifications that the Disney app was running something in the background and it was killing my battery at record speed.

I was complaining about this to my kids in line, or something, because a woman in line near us started talking to me and telling me how she had to change permissions on the app or something so that it would stop running whatever it was running because it was draining her phone’s battery too. I ended up figuring out how to turn that off and I was so excited that she’d told me about that so that my battery lasted more than a few hours in the parks. Eventually, I stopped connecting to the WiFi too so that it would save my battery even more.

Now when I’m in the parks, I hardly ever use Disney’s WiFi, unless for some reason my phone’s service signal is low. And I definitely don’t use if when I try to get FastPasses. In case you didn’t already know, you should stay OFF of Disney’s WiFi when trying to get a boarding pass for Rise of the Resistance at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. It’s used by so many people at once that the WiFi could be slow or unresponsive and be the reason you don’t get that oh-so-hard-to-get boarding pass for that ride.

I didn’t get unlimited data on my family’s phone plan because of Disney World, but it has definitely helped for when I’m there. If you’re one that doesn’t use your phone much when you’re at Disney, this probably doesn’t matter to you, but I like to use my phone and use the My Disney Experience app when I’m in the parks so it’s nice knowing what to expect. °O°