IETF attendees reengineer their hotel's Wi-Fi network | Hacker News Reader

IETF attendees reengineer their hotel's Wi-Fi network

networkworld.com

149 pointsfr0sty31 comments

So, I used to work for a company that provided connectivity for hotels, restaurants, stadiums and other hotspots (like temporary venues). In every case, the network is designed for the common case. Hotels would be low churn, low density, a coffeeshop would be high churn, medium density while a stadium would be extremely high density, massive peak association rate but very high churn. Tech conferences have the same use patterns and density of a stadium. Unless there is prior arrangements and understanding of this, all hotels are going to go "yes, we have interne, yes it's good and we'll charge $x for it" and not notify the provider and not make any changes. Everything they did is standard practice for setting up a high density network.

If you are the organizer of a tech conference, please, communicate that you need special network considerations and get in contact with the hotel's provider, or arrange to have your own provider brought in as soon as possible. 3 months lead time is cutting it close.

Single page link for those who would prefer to read the article whole, rather than broken up into four separate pages:

http://www.networkworld.com/cgi-bin/mailto/x.cgi?pagetosend=...

Install AutoPager and don't worry about things like that anymore.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/autopager/ https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mmgagnmbebdebebbcl...

Wow, thanks! That's one of the things I've always wanted but never knew I wanted.

Does it work with Readability?

Well I just discovered while reading this article that Readability does the autopaging on its own ;)

One interesting fact (which is not quite intuitive) is that one way they improved the WiFi network performance was by disabling the radios on a number of the access points in the hotel.

Less is more in some circumstances.

Along with that, they decreased transmit power which also helped reduce interference.

And later they increased interference, in order to add a 4th channel.

It's all about tradeoffs...that's why they pay engineers the (market-competitive) bucks.

Alternatively, just buy something with features like Aruba's "adaptive radio management" (ARM) that does things like this automagically: http://www.arubanetworks.com/products/arubaos/adaptive-radio...

(pretty sure Cisco has an equivalent but I forget its name...)

Postscript: They talk about HP buying Colubris, but don't think the Colubris-legacy equipment is current-HP stuff; they went and bought 3Com in 2010, and I think that's where most of their current offerings come from.

Motorola has something called Smart RF which is the same thing. Since ExtremeNetworks and Brocade OEM the Motorola kit all 3 have it. I imagine all major vendors have this now.

But you will never be able to completely remove the human from the equation. A proper wireless site survey with someone walking around and taking readings pre/post AP installation is really the best way to do things. I'm not really a WLAN guy but I work with some really bright people who are. There is a lot of depth to this problem that we should not expect to be solved anytime soon by AI.

If you're interested in some of the theory about applying AI to RF determination check out the work of Tim Brown http://ecee.colorado.edu/~timxb/

They later changed all the APs back to full power, "to penetrate walls".

Here's a PDF with diagrams that shows the changes: http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/83/slides/slides-83-iesg-11-...

This is common behavior for hackers: Few years ago I was on a vacation in a nice villa with "internet in the house". It turned out that this means DSL in the administrator's room. One hour trip to the near town later there was Wifi coverage in the estate. Nothing of the their work's magnitude, of course. Drinks were on the house that night.

Only trouble is, they knew how to maintain that DSL in the administrator's room. You won't be there when something goes wrong with the wifi.

The equipment provider offers paid support, I gave them the support number. I don't like to leave people hanging.

Maintenance of a basic WiFi access point has exactly one step:

1. Reset Router.

Hardly rocket science...

> Reset Router.

The shitty crap $20 routers I've seen where plugging it out and in again makes them work again for about 40 seconds make me wish there was a button on them that'd give everyone in the company that pretends to have made them an electric shock.

Dear everyone - you know not to buy anything that's sold through spam emails by now. How about not buying a router that, when you plug it in, makes a faint fizzing sound, costs less than what you think it should and isn't a good brand? No, Belkin is a level of shit yet to be reached by the crap factories of Turdtown. If I had a dollar for every F5D7230 that I wanted to fold in half... just don't trust the reviews. Don't get that Netgear, their firmware is utter crap. Oh, you want bridging mode? You'll need to buy the v8, we've enabled it in the firmware for that. The v7 won't cut it, oh no. WGR614 was the name for that abortion of a craptardation. Just don't buy that crap. If, for a fucking router, they need to do ten revisions of the hardware WGR614v1 to WGR614v10, to get their supplies they need and their shit together, don't buy. Cisco, Linksys, Billion, TP-LINK, Fritz. That's not a whitelist though. Even they have produced utterly worthless things that manage to give LEDs their 5 Volts and whatnot milli-Ampere and give you a nice UI to manage a Wi-Fi connection that just doesn't work.

You want a router for grown-ups? Get the WRT54GL. Ten year and then some track record. Put your own damn firmware on it. How do you know it's for adults? The Amazon page says WARNING CHOKING HAZARD -- Small parts. Not for children under 3 yrs. That warning ain't on D-Link.

The time I have wasted on these pieces of crap you wouldn't believe. Thank you Hacker News, for giving me a place to vent.

Don't forget Apple.

> Don't forget Apple.

You want a simple page you can open in your browser? Noooooo way, that's way too industry standard. Rather have something where you need to keep your configuration software up to date too! It even doesn't work on Linux! What a feature!

My grandmother maintains her own wifi router, and nobody even taught her how....

I'm kind of confused by where conferences (particularly large/government/etc. focused conferences) choose to be. Paris isn't really my first choice for a cost-effective place for a tech conference.

It's not as bad as the ICANN meetings, which were deliberately held in obscure/expensive places around the world just to keep people from attending, in the guise of "being globally representative". The funny/sad thing is that this isn't one of the worst decisions ICANN has made.

Paris is quite cost-effective for Europeans; a quick train ride from London, Brussels or a 1 hour and a half flight from capitals of western europe.

I'm not especially defending the choice of Paris. Brussels or London or Berlin would have been at least as good. Sometimes it's nice to hold engineering meetings elsewhere than in the Valley.

There is a world outside of the US. Most participants of IETF conferences are not from the US or from North America at all. In fact, the IETF came close to deciding not to hold conferences in the US anymore due to increasing visa US from many foreign visitors[0].

[0]:http://isoc.org/wp/ietfjournal/?p=190

I hope that hotel put out free cookies or something for them.

They probably raised the rates on all the visitors afterward.

Actually, the other thread of discussion throughout the week is that IETF attendees at the Concorde Lafayette hotel have been regularly having their rooms burgled. The hotel has not been proactive responding to it, and arguably has been turning a blind eye.

So, more like lumps of coal.

no good deed goes unpunished?

I don't understand the data rate changes. Anyone?

I think they disabled the "1 mbit/s" option. That way, if your device can't get a signal strong enough to maintain at least 2 mbit/s, it will disconnect and try to connect to another AP. This reduces packet loss, packet retransmission, congestion, and noise.

" Increasing the minimum data and multicast rate from 1Mbps to 2Mbps "

In wifi networks, you can significantly reduce on-air collisions with other packets if you can send at a higher rate. A packet being sent at 2Mbps spends 1/2 the time on the wireless channel as compared to a one that is sent at 1Mbps. Therefore halving the probability that this packet will collide with some other transmission.

This article read like a Michael Crichton short story.

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