If you absolutely need network connectivity, bring a cellular-wifi hotspot that you've already tested. Talk to the site organizer to find out what cell networks work there, and if you need to, buy a SIM in advance.
If you don't have an IT organization, you are the IT organization, so be a good one.
As someone who has hosted hack days in many countries on six continents and prides himself on providing a reliable and friendly network (including hand-on supporting IoT folks) for said events, it’s really freaking annoying when someone starts blasting their AP at ridiculous power levels for their one-off use case effectively muddying to hell the RF spectrum of the event space.
They weren't in the wrong for being prepared, but for not listening to you.
It’s the equivalent of bringing a machine gun to a shooting range and spraying bullets all around you (missing everyone, but still causing a bad time for all involved) because you don’t even know how to hold it properly.
example: I need to debug a test-mode stripe webhook and normal approaches have failed for whatever reason. solution: fire up a dev environemnt locally, ngrok it, add the ngrok address to the staging webhook list, profit.
There are tons of use cases.
So you will need to either configure router to open the firewall, or use a solution like this. Which pretty much like current situation -- you need to either configure router to make a NAT mapping, or use a solution like this one.