Big Temporary Networks

Tue Sep 18 20:11:40 UTC 2012

On Sep 14, 2012, at 8:53 AM, Jay Ashworth wrote:
>> Tech had a person managing the feed to DragonCon from the dedicated
>> room w/ the polycomm video conference system, for panels, in addition
>> to the actual union operator of the camera & such.
> 
> The camera ops had to be union?  Hmmm.  Ah, Chicago.  Yes.

That has been true everywhere that Worldcon has been for a number of years, excluding Japan.  Hotel union contracts generally forbid activity being done by any non-union people, even if they are the guests.

> Yes, and I'm told by my best friend who did attend (I didn't make it
> this year) that the hotel wired/wifi was essentially unusable, every
> time he tried.  Hence my interest in the issue.

Always is. Those networks are not built for that many devices attaching. They never are. But they don't want the competition either. If you NEED connectivity at the convention, you must bring your own LTE MIFI and take care of yourself. This is simply not solvable in the convention hotel contracts level. I've got many SMOF friends and I've been trying for years, and it only worked for a small gap of years before hotels starting seeing Internet as a profit vector. Unfortunately, the size requirements of things the size of Worldcon limit the choices enough that this simply can't be a bargaining point.

-- 
Jo Rhett
Net Consonance : net philanthropy to improve open source and internet projects.