A common complaint I hear at defcon and other cons in vegas is that the hotel internet is terrible.
Hopefully good internet service comes as a result of this?
Hopefully good internet service comes as a result of this?
(benign) peak-to-average problem - I'll go ahead and just assume that defcon attendees use a lot more internet bandwidth than the average Vegas-goer, so during defcon the network is overwhelmed, but the rest of the year the capacity is adequate. Upgrading the links to satisfy the peak (defcon) traffic load costs the casinos significant money, but gives minuscule benefit since the rest of the year they only need to support the much lower average load.
(malign) the casinos don't actually want you to have good internet because they don't want you staying in your room internetting - they want you down on the floor gambling. Other non-gambling amenities (shows, restaurants, etc.) are mostly time limited - you only spend so much time eating, and shows are only a couple hours each - and can be a differentiator that draws people to a specific casino (because of specific food/entertainment preferences). Those people then spend the rest of the day gambling at that casino.
"Better" internet it's actually a negative differentiator - people who want to spend all their time infinite-scrolling will gamble less, so casinos don't want to attract them in the first place.
Event venues AND anyplace that might EVER have expense account holding business travelers just want to charge for it. Even if fiber literally rolled right up to the side of the building, it'd be resold by either the hotel or a 3rd party vendor with a focus on profit rather than just being good.
Admittedly the only hotel I stayed in that was considered high end was the Conrad in Los Angeles.
Non anecdotally, I did a search and I couldn’t find a hotel that still charged separately for WiFi, just a “resort fee” that everyone pays.
Some hotels do charge for “premium” WiFi.
So if they had, for example, a 10 Gbps link for the building - that's only 2.5 Mbps per room if everyone wants to use it. Fine when 98% of guests don't want to use it, totally inadequate if all your guests want to use it.
And as I understand things, if someone's offering you a 10 gigabit link for $150 they're relying on you only using it a tiny % of the time. So if you put your 4000 room hotel on a Google Fiber link you'll probably run into the secret download limits after a day or two. And the price for a non-oversold 10-gigabit link seems to be "call our enterprise sales team for pricing"
It's a skill issue from the hotel owners. They can't be bothered to fix their stuff.
For a casino, they probably already have spare conduit or dark fiber to a close by POP so they don't even need LoS microwave links.
Efficiently distributing all of that bandwidth across the many, many, many different wireless access points efficiently is an art and science all on its own and that's probably the aspect most people are complaining about.
How much does it cost to get a 100+ gigabit link set up for a 4 day long event?
I haven't been involved in the last decade, but I'm kind of known as "the guy that makes PyCon networking work", and it can easily be $5K to $10K (from memory) for the hotel, even if you are providing all your own connectivity and gear. I haven't had to do it in recent years because venue Internet has gotten much, much better.
In contrast, for almost all other venues, providing networking is the responsibility of their owner, and they plan their networking gear not for the "one conference to rule them all" but for your everyday trade show.
Convention wireless is a pain in the ass as a whole, and I've seen it both from venue-hosted networks and privately-operated-on-site networks being deployed as an overlay.
It might or might not be connected to the show floor issues, but it's relevant information for a bunch of the in-room internet experience to get significantly worse over time. It suggests that they are not even trying, so the fact that convention wireless is hard is not an excuse.