Over the last few days I’ve been watching a frustrated twitter stream from presenters and attendees at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin. Apparently there has been plenty of WiFi downtime. You would think an organization like O’Reilly, who actually own the web 2.0 brand when it comes to running conferences, would make sure that the twitter crowd (or tweeple) and the blogging fraternity were well served with access and bandwidth. Sadly this is the norm for almost every technology conference I’ve attended in the last year or more. Most recently at last week’s SAP TechEd 2008 in Berlin there were several periods where the WiFi service disappeared, frustrating the bloggers, analysts and press. There was good service with direct wire connections in the blogger and press rooms, but being able to connect from anywhere is essential, both for the people present, and for those of us watching vicariously. For example this morning I could see JP Rangaswami’s slides that had been loaded up in advance of his session “Web 2.0 vs. the Water Cooler: How Web 2.0 Has Changed the Way We Communicate at Work”. Although I wasn’t there, I was able to follow the #w2eb twitter stream while working in a café in Broadwick Street, Soho and get live commentary from people like @elsua, @elsuacon, @frogpond and @lisaharris. Thank heaven it was working today!
The only conference that has got it right that I’ve attended, spoken at or read about in the last 3 years is Ismael Ghalimi’s Office 2.0 Conference. Since the whole premise of the show is to live in the cloud for your office productivity and computing needs, it is logical that everyone attending would want to connect their laptop, netbook, BlackBerry or iPhone to record the event, so WiFi was top priority. In the main conference room there were WiFi repeater boxes on 5 foot stands at intervals down both sides of the room, and the same sort of set up covered all other presentation rooms and meeting areas. The conference was supplied with 40Mbs of bandwidth by laser connection from the conference hotel’s roof. The whole of this was organized, I understand, by Swiscom’s events division. The result - perfect WiFi that worked for everybody from everywhere throughout the event.
But that’s not all - how many conferences have you been to where the sharp guys and gals get in the room early and are connected in corners, or near walls to the few power points available? With Ismael’s conference there were power blocks wired at intervals along almost every row of the conference room. It was always easy to plug in and get power. (By the way, when is battery technology going to make the leaps and bounds that processor speed and memory has done over the last few decades? Maybe the subject of another post sometime!)
So a big shout for Ismael, and a big request for O’Reilly and other technology conference organizers to match up to his standard!
October 23rd, 2008 at 15:26
Sadly, building a high capacity, large scale WiFi network is non-trivial, and most conference organizers (or rather the venues) fail at it miserably, especially under the kind of load the the web2.0 crowd put on a network. I’ve been building wireless networks for more than ten years and still run in to the occasional new challenge. Good on Ismael though - he really gets it right.
October 24th, 2008 at 13:43
David - I couldn’t agree more. Almost is bad is upmarket hotels that want to charge exorbitant prices for Internet access - that after a huge room fee is charged.
In the case of hotels - the answer is to boycott those who charge (funnily enough it’s usually the cheaper ones who have free access). In the case of conferences it’s harder - but building a groundswell of people who want the situation to change should help.
Cheers
October 24th, 2008 at 14:36
Ben,
Glad you agree, and you’ve hit upon my other favourite topics that I’ve blogged before. At SAP TechEd last week we were staying in the SAS Radisson. This is the first premium hotel I’ve stayed in for ages that had good quality, free wifi and wired Internet connection in all rooms. It cracks me up that you can stay in a high class hotel with LCD TV screens in the bathroom, and luxurious fixtures and fittings all over, and then they want to charge you 20-30 euro a day or more in addition for Internet access.
As you rightly say, it is the smaller, boutique hotels that get it right with free wifi access a regular feature. Boycotting the bad ones is the only way.
October 27th, 2008 at 3:24
Hi David, as the organizer of SAP TechEd events around the world (including the recent Berlin conference), I am actually totally in agreement with you. And you rightly point to the difference between your experience with wired access versus wireless. For SAP TechEd, you are I’m sure aware that we bring in massive amounts of technology to pull off the event. 1,000 laptops, hundreds of routers, miles of cable, etc. The one technology that we do not have control over is — you guessed it — wireless access. Wireless access is provided by the venue — and event organizers “rent” the service during the period of the event. We had similar issues in Las Vegas.
You’re also right that technology events make life especially difficult for the IT infrastucture typically found at venues. Venues could be handling events of all kinds — trade shows, association events, boat shows, car shows, etc. Most do not put much if any demand on the venue’s IT infrastructure. Technology events of course DO. All I can say is we hear you — and we will continue to press for greater, stricter service levels as we negotiate agreements with venues going forward. Thanks for the feedback!
October 28th, 2008 at 13:49
Hi Chip,
Really appreciate you picking up on this, and thanks for taking my criticism constructively. Of course it’s logical you rent the wifi from the conference centre, so that’s an area you have less control over. Very glad to hear you will press for better service for next year.
My big issue here is that the conferences that get it right are very few and far between, and the norm is for wifi failure at some point during the day. For example, the Future of Social Media (http://www.futureofsocialmedia.co.uk) conference is going on today here in The Hilton Tower Bridge and I’ve already seen bloggers complaining of service drop outs. It’s just not good enough!
October 30th, 2008 at 13:32
David,
Here’s a link to JP’s talk.
http://www.viddler.com/explore/JasDhaliwal/videos/15/
October 30th, 2008 at 21:36
Excellent Jas - thanks for the link!