Wireless access at Web Directions South - the past and the future

In 2004, at the first conference we ran, there was no wireless access - and I think barely a single person even mentioned it to us.

In 2005, we organized wifi connectivity at UTS, which worked fine if you were on a Mac, but caused major headaches if you were using other operating systems - ah, the joys of VPNs.

In 2006, iBurst, a local provider of wireless broadband connectivity came to the party with bandwidth, and we set up our own wireless network - which wasn’t the best connectivity ever (due to channel collisions, the routers kept crashing, and as it wasn’t a mesh network, floods of connections kept jumping from one router to another, as they crashed, and we ran around manually rebooting them).

Last year, WiredSky, who provide connectivity for special events using iBurst’s network came and set up a wireless mesh network, which while at times a little overloaded, worked well. Adobe also provided their own network for attendees to use, and for those really needing high speed connectivity, you could pay $20 a day to use the convention centre’s network.

At each conference, clearly more and more people were connected, particularly via laptops. We still seem to lag a year or two behind the sheer number of connected folks at conferences we run and attend in the US and North America, but we expect another big increase in the number of people connected at the conference this year - particularly with the arrival last year of the iPod Touch (it was launched the second day of Web Directions South 07), and now the iPhone.

So, this year, here’s what we are doing to try and provide enough bandwidth for all you connected folks to blog, upload photos, Twitter (is that a verb yet?), and otherwise weave the physical and virtual together.

iBurst have once again come to the party, this time with 4Mbps of wireless connectivity. This year, the wonderful folks from Free Australia Wifi (who in part grew out of last year’s conference, with inspiration from Mark Pesce’s closing keynote presentation) are building a mesh network using Meraki devices, which will be spread throughout the lobby/expo/catering areas of the conference. Some might spill a little into the theatres, but it’s part intentional to leave these as wifi restricted zones - letting you concentrate on the presentation, not distracted by incoming messages of one kind or another.

This year too, we’ll have connectivity at the Powerhouse Museum for the workshops, thanks to iBurst and Free Australia Wireless.

We’ll be asking folks to respect the commons - let’s use the bandwidth judiciously, so that everyone can use it for core communication. One challenge is going to be folks uploading photos - which we definitely want to encourage, but which is bandwidth intensive too.

To help, perhaps those of use with 3G modems, and generous 3G data plans for our phones and so on might use our 3G networks as much as possible, to free up bandwidth for the more bandwidth challenged.

A huge thanks to iBurst for this generous support, and the folks at Free Australia Wireless (especially JJ Halans, Lachlan Hardy and Nathaniel Boehm) for their support, technology and expertise.

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