>>>>> "Joe" == Joe Christensen <[email protected]> writes:
Joe> Hello, Joe> I have been researching event wifi and mesh networking (Meraki & Joe> Open-Mesh). Does anyone have experience setting up wifi for a Joe> densely packed room full of technical conference attendees? Joe> Could a mesh network survive in this situation? A mesh is not going to help. That's just more transmitter sharing a busy medium. Joe> It seems like 802.11 is ill suited for 500 live bloggers in a Joe> conference room. How is this accomplished? My basic Joe> understanding is that APs have 3 desired channels (1,6,&11). How Joe> does this scale? Heh. Scale? Joe> I have read of two high profile conferences with 1000+ technology Joe> focused attendees that had horrible wifi issues. (Techcrunch50 & Joe> LeWeb) LeWeb paid 100k for the event networking contract. Joe> Techcrunch replaced the wireless vendor after the 1st day Joe> failure. Are conferences full of technical people starting to Joe> exceed the limits of 802.11? Starting to? Use wires! At OSCON which for several years was held in Portland's convention center, the wifi in the exhibit hall pretty much never worked. At least not between sessions when the exhibit hall filled up. There are three non-overlapping channels on 2.4 GHz. The 3rd party testing of MetroFi's network here showed that at the transition between 6 and 7 clients trying to download at full speed, the aggregate bandwidth of all clients crashed to half of the peak. So, if you've got more than 18 heavy users in a common area, you are screwed! ;-) Probably the best thing to do is to keep power transmit power low, disperse the access points as much as possible, segment the space as much as possible to reduce noise between cells, and use wired backhaul to each access point. I suppose you could also try using 802.11a access points. Fewer client devices will work there, but there is more spectrum available for those that do. -- Russell Senior, Secretary [email protected] --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ The Personal Telco Project - http://www.personaltelco.net/ Donate to PTP: http://www.personaltelco.net/donate Archives: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.network.wireless.portland.general/ Etiquette: http://www.personaltelco.net/index.cgi/MailingListEtiquette List information: http://lists.personaltelco.net To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
