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 :)