Making WiFi work at large conferences | Hacker News Reader

Making WiFi work at large conferences

serverfault.com

67 pointsspolsky13 comments

In the Y Combinator / Anybots office we just switched to Meraki's commercial-grade APs and they kick butt. Only a little more expensive than consumer boxes and they provide seamless roaming between APs, multiple virtual networks, and seem to handle large loads well. Somehow they isolate 802.11b users on a separate channel (there are still plenty of laptops that only do .b), so .g and .n users get full bandwidth. I think they push .a-capable users onto 5 GHz too. Also easy to set up. It's the first of many APs I've owned that hasn't made me pull my hair out. Recommended.

Not to nitpick too much, but HN has a policy of not editorializing titles. Shortening is fine, but "serverfault.com FTW" doesn't really belong there.

PS: It's nothing personal, (I use stackoverflow all the time, it and serverfault are tremendously useful).

Much better exposition here: http://www.tummy.com/Community/Articles/pycon2008-network/

Thanks for the link. I never realized that conference WiFi was such an involved process.

I'd be interested to see what happens if a conference purposefully doesn't have WiFi. Would people talk to each other, or just not show up? Sitting in an audience of a couple of thousand, everyone staring at their screen (that 'Cannot find server' page is enthralling)... it does make one despair for human society, sometimes.

On the other hand, when there's a bad speaker, we'd be limited to Solitaire; and unable to Google further resources, or diversions, or complain about it on HN.

I tend to agree, though being on the #railsconf channel was the only way to make it through Tim Ferris's awful Railsconf keynote this year. Without Wifi there might have been violence.

Speaking of which just got back from Health 2.0, supposedly spent 100K for the wireless. It worked for a total of 1 hour over the course of two days.

I've been to far too many 'tech' events and conventions that the WiFi just falls over and dies. U-Mass Boston was completely unable to handle even the 500 geeks at Podcamp.

MIT's infrastructure has been able to handle everything that I've been to there (ROFLCon, Barcamp, etc). Seems to vary massively by venue.

It's usually rogue APs that cause Wi-fi issues. Two access points broadcasting on the same channel and/or two channels that conflict.

No it's not. It's usually massively saturated APs, an overloaded DHCP server, or too small a pipe, as the linked article said. That, and even one jackass can really hose a system if resources aren't hardened at all (to avoid spam requests, spam AP hopping, etc.), and often they aren't as it's "just temporary". BYOA has become the name of the game for me: thank god for wireless broadband.

The wifi at FOWA London was dreadful this year.

There's a whole company, Confreaks, based around this.

They do pretty sweet recordings of presentations, too.

Indeed - they did an excellent job at RubyConf last year.

Maybe I'm going to the wrong conferences, but I think it was the first I've been to where the wi-fi actually worked.

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