BOISE, Idaho -- Ahh, the rituals of camping.
Crawling out of the sleeping bag on a cool summer morning with the smell of sizzling bacon wafting from the skillet.
Grabbing that first cup of camp coffee and greeting the day by opening up your laptop to see if Wall Street is being kind to your stock portfolio.
"It used to be that when campers would make reservations at an RV park they would ask if the park had water, electricity and sewer," said Kelly Hogan, chief executive of NomadISP, a Boise company that has installed wireless access in more than 300 parks and campgrounds. "But today it's water, electricity, sewer and Wi-Fi."
Four years ago, Nomad was one of the first companies to bring the Internet to recreational vehicle parks and campgrounds.
"From our standpoint it has gotten to the point from not just being nice to have but necessary to have at our RV parks," said Daniel Freedman, an owner of the Hi Valley RV Park in Boise and Ambassador RV Park in Caldwell, Idaho. NomadISP's first installation was in 2002 at Hi Valley.
Hogan spent much of his career working for big technology companies such as International Business Machines Corp. and Oracle Corp. before arriving in Idaho in 1995 to work for Micron Electronics.
His inspiration for NomadISP was his inability to get high-speed Internet access from his home on Lake Harbor in Boise to his office across the lake. He fabricated a wireless microwave system to bring wireless Internet from home to office.
After that, Hogan started exploring a way to bring similar systems to remote areas.
Since the company sold its first product, its customer base has increased 10-fold. He estimates that only about 18 percent of the RV parks and campgrounds in the country is connected to the Internet, and Nomad dominates 40 percent of that market.
A park with 100 to 150 sites spends $3,200 to $4,500 for equipment and pays $100 to $200 a month for service. That price can go up substantially in larger parks. A 350-acre park in New Hampshire spent $25,000 on equipment, Hogan said.
Nomad recently landed a contract as a preferred provider of Internet access at KOA Kampgrounds of America. In a 2006 KOA survey, 53 percent of campers said they brought their laptops camping, up from 32 percent in 2005.
"For us it's just become another amenity we like to offer to our campers," said C.J. Armstrong, a spokeswoman for the Billings, Mont., company.
Armstrong said about 80 percent of KOA's 3,000 campgrounds now have Wi-Fi access. Most parks include it in the nightly fee.
Freedman said a new generation of RV owners - primarily baby boomers and young families - has become accustomed to having Internet access no matter where they go.
"It's an important commodity," said Claudia Burnight, a year-round resident at the Ambassador RV Park in Caldwell, Idaho, who has been a full-time RVer for four years. "I pay most of my bills online, keep up with my banking and keep in touch with my family and friends."
She said some people have turned their RVs into mobile offices and need Internet access for their work.