The 'Wi-Fi At Conferences' Problem

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: dewayne () warpspeed com (Dewayne Hendricks)
Date: October 9, 2009 10:57:17 AM EDT
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <xyzzy () warpspeed com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The 'Wi-Fi At Conferences' Problem

[Note:  This item comes from friend David Isenberg.  DLH]

The “WiFi At Conferences” Problem
by Joel Spolsky
Thursday, October 08, 2009
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/10/08.html>

Why does WiFi work so poorly at tech conferences?

I assume that WiFi wasn’t really designed to handle a big ballroom  
with 2000 people, all trying to connect with their laptops and cell  
phones at the same time. Sometimes I feel like I’m lucky if it works  
in my apartment. So I never thought it was even possible to get it to  
work at a large, technically-savvy conference. At Stack Overflow  
DevDays, yesterday in Boston, the bandwidth seemed OK but the DHCP  
server ran out of addresses. This didn’t seem to be something that  
anyone could fix. The conference organizers (er, me and Greg) were  
incredibly busy trying to, you know, organize the conference, so  
spending time tracking down the mysterious ISP and making them fix  
their router was impossible.

It’s almost getting boring to read the conference reports complaining  
about this. Almost every conference, even the ones put on by fancy  
tech companies, has trouble. I never assume WiFi is going to work  
whenever I’m in a room with that many techies.

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