How Some Geeks Can Produce Better Wi-Fi Than BT
Last weekend most of the FourStarters went to BarcampBrighton. Not only was it weird to see so many Dutch people there (at least 7 on 100 campers, including Reinier, Alper, Melinda, Sjors and me) but it was also amazing how smooth the open Wi-Fi was during the weekend. The last few conferences/camps I went to were a disaster when it came to Wi-Fi. Either it was tedious to get into with day passes that expired during the night, or it broke down within minutes due to overloading. The strange thing about the perfect Wi-Fi at BarcampBrighton was that there was actually no Wi-Fi planned!
The organizers of BarcampBrighton had decided attempting to set up some form of Wi-Fi would probably be futile due to their experiences at other conferences. As the decision was announced at forehand, everyone had decided to bring patch cables (except for me and Melinda, oops) so that they could hook up to the switches. It wasn’t before long though that people like Reinier had set up there own laptops to share Wi-Fi to others. This went pretty fine as there was an instant Wi-Fi reception on more than one access point, that way spreading the load.
Obviously some people had thought a bit further ahead, bringing their own Linksys/Apple routers along to make sure that there would be some kind of permanent solution before the night. This took some more time to set up but proved to be very resilient. Apparently the guys that provide the Wi-Fi at the beach in Brighton (PierToPier) had set up a very good Wi-Fi network indoor that I actually didn’t have to use all day.
In the end we were just all amazed at how we, with some landlines, could provide to a hundred people a more resilient Wi-Fi connection than most of us had ever experienced at any conference. A lesson can be learned here about geeks and their power to do things on their own, and I think we should be proud of that. Geeks in the world, unite (wireless-ly)!
alper http://www.alper.nl
September 14th, 2007Those Linksys routers can be pretty resilient if you drop the correct firmware on them and with the correct setup I think you can also scale them literally linearly.
On most conferences nowadays at least a couple of percent of the people present should have HSDPA connectivity either in their phones or as a card in their laptop. This means landlines are no longer the only source of broadband and these people could make a lot of people happy by sharing their connections.
Side note: I’m massively annoyed with Dutch Consumer Guides for alerting Dutch people to the dangers of open wireless connections to the point of causing mass panic. These days you can find wireless networks pretty much everywhere, but chances of stumbling upon an open one are pretty much zero.