

Wifi at conferences problem - wglb
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/10/08.html

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spolsky
Don't vote up my dinky post... vote up the serverfault q&a, where there are
some terrific answers already.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=870554>

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qhoxie
Defcon sets a good example is this arena. It is said to be the most hostile
network there is, and for years the wifi was effectively unusable. The last
couple of years, though, it has been nearly flawless. I know it has evolved a
lot. For a while I believe that dragorn (<http://www.nerv-un.net/~dragorn/>)
helped run it.

Lockheed and the rest of the netops team gave a spectacular talk this year on
how the network is designed. You can read about it here:
<http://www.defconnetworking.org/index.php?itemid=33>

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joez
Techcrunch50 had really good internet.

They did do a release with some statistics.
[http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/20/techcrunch50-had-
intern...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/20/techcrunch50-had-internet-and-
then-some-mariette-systems-ftw/)

"There were more than 1,200 simultaneous connections at peak points, and
bursts of up to 88 Mbps inbound bandwidth usage."

and 28 wifi access points and more than 100 cisco switches incase Wifi was
down.

Jason Calacanis said in an interview they paid 86k for the two days. Not sure
if this is right but it could be a rough ballpark.

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FraaJad
PyCon 2009 had excellent wifi coverage. I wonder what technology/setup they
used?

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incomethax
Amen to this.

We were just at Health 2.0 the last couple of days which was held at the San
Francisco design concourse, they had 6 access points for 1000+ people in one
large room. For most of the conference, wifi was spotty at best, non-
detectable otherwise. It also didn't help that when a speaker was on the main
stage, most of the people watching were only in range of one or two access
points.

This article will be really helpful if more conference organizers can spend
some time looking at it.

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gonzo
Biggest problem I see is the "oh, we have 3 non-overlapping channels" thing,
so APs end up on all three.

Oh, sure, they're non-overlapping in terms of transmit mask, but the receiver
selectivity on these devices.... isn't the best. Result: lots of smashed
packets, and poor performance.

(I was the founding CTO of Wayport.)

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sayrer
I've always wondered why people go to conferences where they sit on their
laptops. It's like fiddling with your cell phone at a meeting.

~~~
mechanical_fish
A large part of a modern techie's intelligence is resident on the Web.

This is particularly true at a tech conference, which is all about picking up
names and opinions that need to have the facts filled in around them. You go
to a talk. The speaker says, offhand, that they just built a big system around
AMQP on Erlang. You want to know what the hell AMQP is, and what Erlang is, so
that you can ask the speaker or your fellow audience members some intelligent
follow-up question before they disappear from your presence. You need
Wikipedia, Google, and a handful of specific useful blog posts, and you need
'em now.

Another problem is that many of these conferences are so darned huge that you
need electronic networks just to locate your colleagues.

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Alex3917
Wouldn't it just be easier to make a list of venues in each city that are
known to have good WiFi?

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tomjen2
Wasn't he the guy who said to use the simplest possible thing that could work
(the hole duck tape thing?) - if so, just ditch wireless and go with good old
fashion Ethernet cable, you can string it along the underside of the chairs
along with the other wires.

