North American Network Operators Group
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Re: wifi for 600, alex

  • From: Suresh Ramasubramanian
  • Date: Wed Feb 14 19:28:52 2007
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There are a few fairly easy things to do.

1. Don't do what most hotel networks do and think that simply sticking
lots of $50 linksys routers into various rooms randomly does the
trick.  Use good, commercial grade APs that can handle 150+
simultaneous associations, and dont roll over and die when they get
traffic

2. Plan the network, number of APs based on session capacity, signal
coverage etc so that you dont have several dozen people associating to
the same AP, at the same time, when they could easily find other APs
... I guess a laptop will latch onto the AP that has the strongest
signal first.

3. Keep an eye on the conference network stats, netflow etc so that
"bandwidth hogs" get routed elsewhere, isolate infected laptops
(happens all the time, to people who routinely login to production
routers with 'enable' - telneting to them sometimes ..), block p2p
ports anyway (yea, at netops meetings too, you'll be surprised at how
many people seem to think free fat pipes are a great way to update
their collection of pr0n videos),

3a. Keep in mind that when you're in a hotel and have an open wireless
network, with the SSID displayed prominently all over the place on
notice boards, you'll get a lot of other guests mooching onto your
network as well.  Budget for that too.

4. Isolate the wireless network from the main conference network /
backbone so that critical stuff (streaming content for workshop and
other presentations, the rego system etc) gets bandwidth allocated to
it just fine, without it being eaten up by hungry laptops.

5. Oh yes, get a fat enough pipe to start with.   A lot of hotel
wireless is just a fast VDSL or maybe a T1, with random linksys boxes
scattered around the place.

--srs

On 2/15/07, Marshall Eubanks <[email protected]> wrote:

> Carl Karsten wrote:
>> Hi list,
>> I just read over: http://www.nanog.org/mtg-0302/ppt/joel.pdf
>> because I am on the PyCon ( http://us.pycon.org ) team and last
>> year the hotel supplied wifi for the 600 attendees was a disaster

> How was the wifi at the resent nanog meeting?

I thought it was quite good. I also think that the IETF wireless has
gotten its act together recently as well;
I suspect that Joel Jaeggli has had something to do with this.
> I have heard of some success stories 2nd hand.  one 'trick' was to
> have "separate networks" which I think meant unique SSID's.  but
> like I said, 2nd hand info, so about all I can say is supposedly
> 'something' was done.