Monday, July 06, 2009

The Limits of Wi-Fi

I'd just like to point out that in no way was Wi-Fi designed to handle things like convention halls with hundreds or thousands of people trying to connect at the same time. Maybe people get to to work under these situations occasionally, but overall, the problem is not so much that conference organizers don't know how to do (or that people want) Wi-Fi, but that almost everyone's expectations of Wi-Fi are simply too high.

Perhaps knowing this will lower your blood pressure in the future.

2 comments:

Kurt Paccio said...

I would agree. The expectation was just too much at NECC09. Every single participant had either an iPhone, iTouch, Blackberry with WiFi, laptop, netbook, etc.

This isn't the first conference hall to run into saturation. In fact, conference regulars resorted to BYOB... Bring Your Own Bandwidth with broadband cards and tethering.

Side note, almost every netbook I saw was running Windoze. Opportunity lost!

Eric T. MacKnight said...

I wonder if this observation has any relevance to schools running wireless laptop programs . . .