Don't vote up my dinky post... vote up the serverfault q&a, where there are some terrific answers already.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=870554

Defcon sets a good example is this arena. It is said to be the most hostile network there is, and for years the wifi was effectively unusable. The last couple of years, though, it has been nearly flawless. I know it has evolved a lot. For a while I believe that dragorn (http://www.nerv-un.net/~dragorn/) helped run it.

Lockheed and the rest of the netops team gave a spectacular talk this year on how the network is designed. You can read about it here: http://www.defconnetworking.org/index.php?itemid=33

PyCon 2009 had excellent wifi coverage. I wonder what technology/setup they used?

Techcrunch50 had really good internet.

They did do a release with some statistics. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/20/techcrunch50-had-intern...

"There were more than 1,200 simultaneous connections at peak points, and bursts of up to 88 Mbps inbound bandwidth usage."

and 28 wifi access points and more than 100 cisco switches incase Wifi was down.

Jason Calacanis said in an interview they paid 86k for the two days. Not sure if this is right but it could be a rough ballpark.

Amen to this.

We were just at Health 2.0 the last couple of days which was held at the San Francisco design concourse, they had 6 access points for 1000+ people in one large room. For most of the conference, wifi was spotty at best, non-detectable otherwise. It also didn't help that when a speaker was on the main stage, most of the people watching were only in range of one or two access points.

This article will be really helpful if more conference organizers can spend some time looking at it.

Biggest problem I see is the "oh, we have 3 non-overlapping channels" thing, so APs end up on all three.

Oh, sure, they're non-overlapping in terms of transmit mask, but the receiver selectivity on these devices.... isn't the best. Result: lots of smashed packets, and poor performance.

(I was the founding CTO of Wayport.)

I've always wondered why people go to conferences where they sit on their laptops. It's like fiddling with your cell phone at a meeting.

A large part of a modern techie's intelligence is resident on the Web.

This is particularly true at a tech conference, which is all about picking up names and opinions that need to have the facts filled in around them. You go to a talk. The speaker says, offhand, that they just built a big system around AMQP on Erlang. You want to know what the hell AMQP is, and what Erlang is, so that you can ask the speaker or your fellow audience members some intelligent follow-up question before they disappear from your presence. You need Wikipedia, Google, and a handful of specific useful blog posts, and you need 'em now.

Another problem is that many of these conferences are so darned huge that you need electronic networks just to locate your colleagues.

Unlike a meeting where the presenters might be annoyed, the opposite is true; they'd like the audience to help them generate hype. This could be especially true at a conference like Demo or Techcrunch50 where many products are being launched. You want people to be able to try it out right then and there. There are potential investors watching. More important could be the tech evangelists with huge followings watching. A blog post or even a tweet from them could be worth thousands of users. You want them to tweet you, get retweeted and generate that viral buzz.

Wouldn't it just be easier to make a list of venues in each city that are known to have good WiFi?