Joel Spolsky on Wifi At Conferences

Why does the wifi at conferences always suck? Joel Spolsky knows and tells all:

[via The “WiFi At Conferences” Problem - Joel on Software]

At the smaller conferences, the ones with, say, 300-1000 people, the trouble is that internet access is something of a black box. If you’re a conference organizer, your first priority is finding a space—any space—because there usually aren’t a lot of options. For example if you want to put on an event for 500 people in Seattle, there are probably 20 hotels that can accomodate you and maybe 10 other non-hotel venues. For the date you want, 3/4s of them are booked. You end up choosing between three options, if you’re really lucky. The venue with the best Internet access would be nice, but there are so many other considerations that you don’t really think about this when you’re booking the space. Besides, all the venues tell you they have fantastic, soo-perb A-number-1 internet access. When you try to ask complicated questions and explain that your conference has a lot of techies, they say, yes, we understand, we have A-number-1 internet access, no problem very good. When you say, “Yeah, but have you configured your DHCP server so that it has more than the default 254 IP addresses available to hand out,” they have no idea what on earth you’re talking about, and of course it turns out that they had some vendor, a company you’ve never heard of, provide their internet access. And half the time, that vendor installed a DSL line from the local telco and hooked it up to a LinkSys WRT54g they got at Costco, then installed some kind of crappola welcome-screen software just to make it even worse, and then disappeared.

There are steps that can be taken. Here’s an interesting study [PDF] done by Intel about making WiFi work at large conferences. The best idea I got from that was that there should be as many hardwired network access points as possible, to get the heavy users off the air, because ethernet has way more bandwidth. There are companies that specialize in making WiFi systems that will support large conferences: one that I found is called Meraki; I don’t know much about them but their website sure makes it seem like they understand the issues at least.

At the very least, though, a venue should be able to tell you how many access points they actually have (if it’s just one, you’ve got problems), whether they are managed access points or not, whether dedicated ports with higher priority can be provided for the speakers and for journalists that do not share bandwidth with the audience, how many IP addresses the DHCP server can provide, the total number of people that can be online at once, and the amount of bandwidth available to the entire site. If you can’t get good answers to these questions before the conference begins, you have to assume that they’ll be running a single, consumer router connected to a DSL line and that’s about all you get.

I am surprised, though, that so few professional buy and use a cell modem. Perhaps its just me, but I have found it to be the single most liberating purchase ever, short of my laptop itself. I never rely on the conference organizers, or hotel owners, or airports for my connectivity. When its up and working, fine, I use it, but when it isn’t I just slip in the cell modem and bingo. Occasionally I wind up in a venue where there is also no cell reception, but that’s pretty rare.

Of course, it does cost, but the benefit of being connected in the taxi on the way to the airport, or at the airport and avoiding the $9/hour that some try to charge… well, it’s worth the $70/month I pay.

I have also read about wifi systems that are driven by a bank of cell modems, so a conference organizer — at least for a relatively small show — wouldn’t need to be reliant on the venues DSL line at all.