wifi for 600, alex

Wed Jan 24 02:21:58 UTC 2007

Carl Karsten wrote:
> 
> Hi list,
> 
> I just read over: http://www.nanog.org/mtg-0302/ppt/joel.pdf because I
> am on the PyCon ( http://us.pycon.org ) team and last year the hotel
> supplied wifi for the 600 attendees was a disaster (they probably were
> not expecting every single one to have and use a laptop the whole
> time).  Joel's pdf was for a conference in 2002 or 3, so I am hoping
> much has changed.  But from what I have found, I think my hopes may be
> just a dream.

Let me just say that my experience since then has been informative, but
that I haven't really had time to condense that into another preso. We
were working on an IETF hosting document that would have covered some of
the experiences, but that morphed into a requirements docuement which is
less useful for someone looking for pointers.

In our recent endeavors we've spent a lot more time focused on ap
density and less on rf engineering and ap tuning and we have generally
avoided disaster...

An observation I would make is that the number of mac addresses per
person at the tech heavy meeting has climbed substantially over 1 (not
to 2 yet) so it's not so much that everyone brings a laptop... it's that
everyone brings a laptop, a pda and a phone, or two laptops. In a year
or two we'll be engineering around 2 radio's per person in five years
who knows.

> Does anyone have any advice or URLs of more recent case studdies in
> supplying wifi for 600 laptop wielding geeks?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Carl K
> 
> ps, Google is one of our sponsors, and I see that they want to be the
> next inertube or something - maybe we can get them to do it :)
> 