meeting network

Tue Oct 11 13:12:48 UTC 2011

On Oct 11, 2011, at 8:22 AM, Owen DeLong wrote:
> On Oct 10, 2011, at 10:32 PM, Joel jaeggli wrote:
>> On 10/10/11 07:00 , Owen DeLong wrote:
>> 
>>> It would be wise for NANOG to approach future venues and specifically
>>> discuss these things with the hotel IT departments in question ahead
>>> of time so that they have some remote chance of being prepared.
>> 
>> The hotel IT department is the guy who runs the as400 that gets
>> reservations from corprate, and runs the POS terminals.
>> 
>> the room-net is by-in-large run by a third party such as lodgenet.
>> 
> In my experience, you start with the hotel IT department and they at least know who to talk to at LodgeNet/whoever in order to reach someone that can provide a useful response.

To be perfectly clear, the hotel IT department is a fine escalation point
once you're close the actual event, and that they will bring in others 
as needed.  This even works if you need to pull fiber into a facility for 
additional bandwidth, with the hotel IT/telecom team often getting 
involved months in advance.

At the time of _contracting_ (more than 1 year in advance in many cases),
the ability to pierce the sales veil of "Yes, we can do anything you need"
and "It's no problem" can be quite difficult, even if one does an on-site
visit and meets with the hotel IT team. They are trained to avoid raising
any issues in the sales process, and prioritize any actual technical level
engagement with their partners until well past contract. They often do not
even have the ability to engage their partners except during an actual 
performance problem, so expecting them to get someone on the phone a year
in advance of an event to commit to an unusual configuration may be quite
limited (or even absent in the case of hotel chains whose wireless partner 
relationship is held by the hotel chain parent corporation.)

I'm not saying that it is not worth trying; I just want folks to have a
realistic understanding of how these arrangements are actually made.  It
is far better today then in the past, as there have been many conferences
over the years where step 1 was pulling the coax or fiber through the 
hotel to establish their first-ever network infrastructure...  :-)

FYI,
/John