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:the phone (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh come on, why does it have to be useful? The hotel let us do it! (I'm guessing that it had a USB ethernet dongle, but I wasn't there, so I don't know for sure.)
I feel very fortunate that a majority of my business travel is to IETF meetings, because this is the only time that I ever experience functional internet in a hotel. It can be pretty fantastic--in Hiroshima, the WIDE team rewired _all_ of the IETF hotels, which is about five different hotels. In almost every IETF since Seoul, the IETF NOC has provided the connectivity for the conference hotel for the duration of the conference, and the connectivity has been excellent.
It's too bad that hotels can't afford to pay IETF geeks to fix their connections on a more general basis, and that there isn't a commercial provider that's able to provide a similar level of service for a price hotels can afford. Sometimes I think we ought to have an independent hotel WiFi rating service, so that hotels would have to actually compete on the basis of the quality of their Internet service.
Lower power (Score:5, Interesting)
Happens all the time (Score:5, Interesting)
The IETF basically re-engineers the Hotel's network every place they meet. The big difference is, sometimes they get permission to do this before the meeting, and sometimes (as here in Paris), they don't get this permission until after the Hotel's network melts down.
(By the way, I am at the meeting, and I heard that the Hotel's IT head has now been fired. This is not too surprising when one of the major fixes was to turn off
the majority of the access points.)
Extreme Wifi Makeover (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
But but.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Nobody ever got fired for listening to a vendor. They all have your needs and best interest at heart when they quote you the bare minimum you absolutely need to buy.