On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 2:22 PM, Joe Christensen <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hello, > > I have been researching event wifi and mesh networking (Meraki & > Open-Mesh). Does anyone have experience setting up wifi for a densely > packed room full of technical conference attendees? Could a mesh > network survive in this situation? > > It seems like 802.11 is ill suited for 500 live bloggers in a > conference room. How is this accomplished? My basic understanding is > that APs have 3 desired channels (1,6,&11). How does this scale?
I would be less worried about the channel overlap and more worried about having adequate radios to support all the users at once. Also, if you have a mesh, keep in mind that your bandwidth is going to drop with each hop, so you'll want relatively few hops prior to the backhaul connections (max 3-4). > I have read of two high profile conferences with 1000+ technology > focused attendees that had horrible wifi issues. (Techcrunch50 & > LeWeb) LeWeb paid 100k for the event networking contract. Techcrunch > replaced the wireless vendor after the 1st day failure. Are > conferences full of technical people starting to exceed the limits of > 802.11? OSCON seemed to routinely brake the WiFi at the Oregon Convention Center. I think much of this was due to DHCP lease issues, and the ability of their APs to handle the connections, and not necessarily the result of too much activity. 90% or more of tech convention attendees are going to have always-on WiFi devices (and many will probably fire up a laptop at some time as well), meaning that the network will need to support at least connection per attendee. Most wireless conference systems (be they built-in or vendor delivered for the event) are probably based on old usage data where 1000 attendees translated to some significantly smaller percentage of users at any one time. -- Michael Weinberg President Personal Telco Project, Inc. A 501(c)(3) Non-Profit --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
