IETF Attendees Reengineer Their Hotel's Wi-Fi Net 120
alphadogg writes "What happens when a bunch of IETF super nerds show up in Paris for a major conference and discover their hotel's Wi-Fi network has imploded? They give it an Extreme Wi-Fi Makeover. Members of the Internet Engineering Task Force, who gathered for the outfit's 83rd meeting this week in France, discovered as they arrived at the Hotel Concorde Lafayette that the Wi-Fi was flakey and became flakier still as scores more attendees arrived and tried to connect, and the wired net was having issues of its own. Working behind the scenes, a team of IETF attendees negotiated with the hotel and were granted access to the wireless network, and began rigging up all sorts of fixes, which even included taping a Nexus S phone to a ceiling and turning off the radios on numerous access points to reduce noise."
Re: Nexus S phone??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wheres the Beef?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because they are a Hotel, and don't give a shit if their network is flaky. They have been using Microsoft products for more than a decade, so when things sometimes work and sometimes don't, then that is just them darn computers behaving flaky as always.
Re:the phone (Score:5, Insightful)
Having all hotels provide connectivity suitable for a LARGE group of internet junkies is financially stupid.
Most hotels have adequate coverage for their normal guest load, so they use the cheapest provider capable of providing that adequate coverage.
No other event in the hotel is going to require the connectivity perfection that an IETF conference is going to require, its a waste of money for them to engineer and build out an IETF compatible network. Its far simpler to get some joe the plumber from the PCGuys Shop down the street to throw in a DSL line and enough APs that no one bitches, and for the most part, works just fine.
Not every hotel NEEDS that kind of connectivity. For instance the hotel I went to for my wedding had absolutely shitty connectivity and if you asked they would politely respond, aren't you here for your wedding sir? And they were right :) Disney has absolutely shitty connectivity and their response is rather atypical for Disney in that it is intentionally bad, you're not supposed to be dicking around on the Internet at Disney.
They also don't need to pay for DS3 or so of bandwidth for the hotel if it isn't filled with bandwidth hogs (which I actually doubt the IETF are, probably the opposite but just making a point.)
Re:Wheres the Beef?? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, these guys are really, really good. They know what they are doing, and have been doing it, successfully, for several years. For several years before that, we didn't do so well. These guys have all the tools, and mostly, the experience. They can do it quick, and work within the constraints of the existing system. A regular network consulting company would take a couple of weeks, do a poorer job, insist a lot of new equipment is needed and charge an arm and a leg, which is why the hotel didn't do it. In a few hours they mapped the network, analyzed the configuration, designed a new plan, deployed it, tested it, and made it work. They did it on a product line they had not dealt with before. It was very impressive.
The actual fun issue is: they logged all the original state. They have a tool that maintains the entire configuration. They can leave it in one of two conditions: exactly the way it was before they changed everything, or in the state it is now. The hotel can make that choice.
Re:Extreme Wifi Makeover (Score:2, Insightful)
I would so watch that show! Every week, they take us to a company to look over their pathetic network and re-do it properly and with moar power. I can see it now...the teary-eyed IT manager is brought in to see his new network...it'd be like Bob Vila for geeks.
Wrong. The Teary-eyed IT manager is fired. And the ensuing publicity is enough to blacklist him for some time.
Re:Happens all the time (Score:2, Insightful)
The access points have been turned back on, but on different channels. The transmit power has been upped to the default value again as well. In the end the best result came from just changing the channels: http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/83/slides/slides-83-iesg-11-ietf-operations-and-administration-plenary.pdf
If the hotel fired the IT guy because he had not provided them with as good a network configuration as a hotel full of IETF engineers did, I think they're going to be surprised when they hear what kind of salary a top notch network specialist can command in Paris. (Their first attempt even made things worse for some attendants! Getting Wifi right for a lot of heavy users is not easy.)