I suspect the problem is the (offsite) hotel that Mark and I are at was not really prepared for a full house of folks interested in viewing streams, downloading documents, etc. (despite attempts to inform the hotel of the impending tsunami). I imagine folks involved in setting up NANOG-related networks might be familiar with this sort of situation...
I've talked to people who do conference arrangements, and no matter what you tell the hotel, the hotel talks to their outsourced Internet provider, who tells them it will be fine, which of course it will not be. The hotel outsourcers also tend to have poorly trained staff who think that the way to increase wifi capacity is to turn the power on all of the APs up to 11. The IETF deals with this problem by writing into the conference agreement that their netops people will take over the hotel's network for the duration of the meeting, and bring in their own adequate backhaul. Dunno what ICANN does.