I'm attending
Gnomedex 7 (2007) at the very nice Bell Harbor Conference Center (BHCC) in downtown Seattle, Washington (right on the waterfront, where the big, beautiful cruise ships dock) today and tomorrow. My compliments to Ponzi and Chirs Pirillo for deciding to put Gnomedex into this very nice venue.
I decided to attend Gnomedex to learn more about the business of blogging, but I'm starting to conclude that Gnomedex is more about the ecosystem... community is actually a better word... of the blogosphere. "Not about the business of blogging..." isn't a bad thing because some of the presentations are mind-expanding, and starting to make me to think about the larger dimensions of what I write about - Broadband Wireless Internet Access.
One thing that's impressive is the number of attendees that have laptops; the percentage of Macs in the audience is easily North of 25%. Some rows it's 100% of the attendees are using laptops. The downside is that 90% of us attendees are using the BHCC Wi-Fi, and their Wi-Fi infrastructure is simply not up to the challenge of all these (often very demanding) users (some of whom were trying to stream video and other bandwidth-intensive applications). The other ten percent or so are using Wireless Telephony Broadband ... if I had one, I would be too. In this situation, email is problematic at best, and blog posting is completely hit or miss.
What's dissapointing is that BHCC is a high-end venue - I've read of very high-end International conferences are held here, and as such, the performance and reliability of BHCC's Wi-Fi should be much better. The technology and the expertise to do such planning, engineering, and deploying the infrastructure certainly exists - imagine the issues Microsoft (what... a mere ten miles East?) has (encountered, figured out, and solved) with their Wi-Fi network! What's even more disappointing is that the Gnomedex staff don't seem to recognize, or acknowledge, the issue. Given that almost every attendee is an active blogger, that attitude is puzzling.
(Update 1) I had a chance to talk to Chris Pirillo about the Wi-Fi issues. While he wasn't aware of the extent of the issues that the attendees were encountering, Ponzi Pirillo was. I explained that (without access to monitoring tools) that it appeared to me that the BHCC's Wi-Fi Access Points (APs) were simply being overwhelmed with the number of devices associating with them, and the APs were dropping packets and associations. Likely with all the high-bandwidth activity, the backhaul could be saturated (I think Chris said they had a total of 10 Mbps, some of which was being used for video streaming). I also explained to Chris that it would have been relatively easy to have one of the high-bandwidth BWIA providers in the Seattle area such as Nextlink or Towerstream could have provided a "pipe" as big as 100 Mbps to the BHCC with as little as a few day's notice... Chris was amazed; he'd never heard of such a thing :-) I didn't get a chance to explain to Chris that there were also numerous peer-to-peer Wi-Fi networks proliferating at the conference, which of course interferes with BHCC's Wi-Fi; stopping those would probably help a lot, and I'll suggest that.
By Steve Stroh
This article is Copyright © 2007 by Steve Stroh. Excerpts and links are expressly permitted (and encouraged).
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