the economies of scale of a Worldcon, and how to make this topic relevant to Nanog

Jo Rhett jrhett at netconsonance.com
Fri Sep 21 20:08:22 UTC 2012


On Sep 21, 2012, at 10:00 AM, Jay Ashworth wrote:
> And this is pretty much precisely why I'm hammering the nail; there's 
> *lots* of stuff that could -- and properly should -- be technology 
> assisted at the world's largest gathering of science fiction enthusiasts.

No point in building fast access to nothing (related to the con) ;-)

I'm not saying that's right, but it is what is.  And don't forget that right now hard SF is a pretty mean minority. The vast majority of sci-fi fans are into steampunk and other alt history these days. (and don't get me started about that)  iPhones are not generally strapped to their victorian outfits.

> Assuming you can get close enough -- which won't be geographically 
> practical for ... oh, wait; you're envisioning 3G, not WLAN.  Yeah,
> I suppose that might work... until you consider that I will, personally,
> be bringing both laptops, my tablet, and my phone, all of which want 

All of which can use LTE either natively or with a dongle.

> to talk to the outside world.  I would bet that I'm not all *that* 
> unusual in that, at a Worldcon, based on some attendee conversations 
> I've had at Anticipation and the much less well attended NASfic 10, 
> ReConstruction.

You aren't unusual, but you aren't the average by a long shot.

> A lot of this, too, depends on what the concom negotiated with the
> property about wifi access already.

And this is where you're going to hit some very hard walls.  

One of which I forgot to mention. Many of the hotels (I believe all Hilton properties at this time) have sold the facilities space for their wifi network to another company. They CAN'T negotiate it with you, because they don't own it any more. And most of these wifi networks have stealth killers enabled, so that they spoof any other wifi zone they see and send back reject messages to the clients. So you can't run them side by side.

Try having a conversation with the hotel rep in charge of selling convention space about these kind of technical bits about wifi networks sometime. If you don't mind tearing your hair out at the time. Or tearing it out later, after you've been assured that the hotel will "make it all work" and then find that none of this equipment is within their control. (they don't care, you're already there and can't go anywhere else)

Sorry I'm being so negative on this topic. Got more than a few burnt fingers on this one :)

> Can I get 12000 sessions on a single LTE tower?

Yes.  Can you get 12000 sessions through any single POE gateway? ;-)

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






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