⇥ Wifi at conferences: why it sucks
Wifi at conferences: it sucks, and there are some really good reason why it’s not easy to fix.
Together with the rest of my team, I have now organized ten different PHP conferences (in fact, if you count Codeworks as seven separate events, we have organized sixteen, but that’s another story). We’ve had highs and lows, but if I had to pick one thing we and our attendees have never been fully satisfied with, it’ would have to be Internet connectivity. Not an event goes by that someone—usually several people, in fact—doesn’t publicly complain about the fact that the Wifi connection in the meeting rooms is not up to snuff.
On one hand, if that’s the worst thing people have to say about our events, I suppose we could do much worse—at the very least, our food didn’t cause the most massive case of food poisoning since Lucrezia Borgia invited 500 of her closest friends for a wine and anthrax party.
On the other, anything that makes people unhappy is obviously a clear candidate for improvement and, therefore, for the past few years I have been trying to figure out a solution to help us improve the quality of wireless access. Of course, I have failed. Of course, people keep nagging me about it. Of course, I’m not the only person who has this problem. In fact, the almighty Joel Spolsky had the same exact problem at his very popular StackOverflow DevDays, so at least now when people complain to me about the fact that they just can’t torrent their favourite movie while listening to a talk I can point them in the direction of the Almighty Joel and note that even His Excelness can’t get it done.
Let me see if I can illustrate what the problem is. First of all, it’s a matter of people—techies are not your typical Internet user, not only because there will be a much higher percentage of Wifi clients than there would be in just about any other group of comparable size, but also because their expectations are skewed by their experience. If you come to a room built for Rotary Club dinners with 200 techies in it and expect the Internet to work as well as it does at home, where there are maybe four people accessing it at the same time, you are bound to be very disappointed.
“But wait,” you’re probably thinking, “I would expect you to do your homework and ensure that the appropriate infrastructure is available at the venue to make the Internet scale so that it feels exactly like the one I have at home.” And so you would, but you’re ignoring a few facts that are quite obvious on further inspection:
- First, venues will set themselves up to serve their average customer—would you invest the extra money in an infrastructure so that you could satisfy the needs that are specific only to maybe 5% of your customers? Of course not, because you’d have to amortize the additional investment across your other 95%, which would affect your competitiveness.
- Second, Internet is only one of the considerations that go into organizing a conference. For example, the vast majority of attendees to our “big” conference in Chicago come from out of state—if you had just flown for three or four (or, as is the case with foreigners, nine or ten) hours, do you really want to get off the plane and have to negotiate a half-hour taxi ride? Would you want to eat in a college cafeteria so that you can get better Internet access? Believe me, you wouldn’t—even if you may be telling yourself you would, statistics show otherwise.
- Third, the cost of anything that is related to a conference is amplified by its ephemeral nature. I don’t normally share cost information (after all, making conferences work financially is my problem, and not anybody else’s), but a 10Mibps connection can easily cost $10,000 for three days of usage (and, believe it or not, that is a gigantic bargain that needs to be written into your catering contract as a “concession” on the hotel’s behalf, as the regular price could easily exceed $30,000). And that still doesn’t solve the problem of getting Wifi to work properly.
Of these three problems, cost is, obviously, the main limiting factor. If we had an unlimited budget, we could conceivably hire an external company, have them do a study on the topology of each hotel we go to, come up with a mesh plan for wireless coverage and, potentially, find a solution that will make the Internet work. The problem is, who is going to pay for it? The hotel won’t care—to them, conferences like ours are an edge case. They’d rather invest their money in finding more ways to charge us $10 for a cup of coffee. On our side, I hope you won’t think less of me if I say that investing $100,000 in someone else’s infrastructure would be a great way for me to get the board to kick me out of the company before I can say “mesh.”
So, where does that leave us? It leaves us to finding a solution that works reasonably. If you come to a conference expecting to be able to use the Internet in case of need, or occasionally to check mail and the likes, I think we can find a workable solution, possibly using a combination of wired and wireless access. If you’re looking for an Internet connection that works like the one you have at home—you should consider looking into one of the many cellular data solutions. They are cheap, portable and work well almost everywhere.
Comments
Start a website that rates connectivity of conference centers and SLAM the ill-prepared and overpriced ones while lauding the good ones?
They are all going to suck.
They are simply not designed for a high bandwidth crowd, as Marco points out, because it's not cost-effective.
Might as well ask why we don't have optical fiber into every home.
Same thing, really.
Hey Marco,
All hotels suck a donkey on this point. And it aint your fault either. But nobody is there torrenting movies during talks, or expecting to do that, they simply want to check email and find info related to the talk online. The real reason why hotels dont do it is because when it comes to technology and the internet, they are all a pack of muggles. Its simply not their line of work, so they dont even know how to make an effort. We are not such a high bandwith crowd as is suggested. We just want to post a tweet now and then.
Everything is too expensive in hotels, but why not pay a specialized company to handle the WiFi? They can do that for less than 3000$.
Downloading torrents at a conference should be seen as an exception. I've attended conferences where the WiFi didn't suck, and was happy to be able to continue working away from the office (SVN, e-mail, …)
I’m glad this isn’t /MY/ problem anymore (-:
S
Amen.
It doesn’t matter if you’re at Moscone Center or the Esplanade in Singapore (although your WiFi experience in SF is likely going to be better); it can handle at best the /mean/ demand put on it by any event, and likely a couple sigma below that. WiMax was supposed to be The Answer™; well, we all see how well THAT worked out.
I suspect that the long-term solution is going to be wired rather than wireless; run fiber around the hall, put RJ-45 jacks on the armrests or under the seat, and deal with that. That would also tend to make it more difficult for Bad Folks to do spoofing attacks – a not inconsiderable benefit, especially to Windows usees who have no idea what I’m talking about anyway.