Wifi at Web Directions South this year – latest news

• In: Blog
• By: Maxine
• September 10, 2008

Following on from all the comments we got on the the two blog posts we put out there last week on this topic, John and I decided to do a bit further investigation into extending wifi into the conference theatres this year at Web Directions South. It hasn’t quite been a Channel 7 investigation, but an investigation nonetheless.

The obvious thing to look into was how hard it would be to pull the network already being provided by iburst in there. Ideally, we would run cables into each room from the iburst modems, then set up a new network for each room. The way this venue is set up, it’s just not feasible to do this.

So I gave the venue a call and looked into what it would cost for them to set up a network for us, using their broadband connections to the rooms. To get a 6Mb connection with 8Gb download limit, including their labour charges plus equipment hire, came in at a cool $5000. We did think about this at length and decided that considering we are in fact providing wifi at the conference with out current setup, this was not a good way to spend a discretionary $5000.

The upshot of it is, all those who have offered to try and help spread the love by bringing in their Merakis with a view to trying to pull a bit of the lobby network into the theatres, are welcome to do so and we really appreciate your help with this. One thing to be aware of is that devices like this which are going to be plugged into the electricity are supposed to be tagged. Just so you know. I’m doing my very best to make the wifi as powerful and widespread as it possibly can be here, but you do need to appreciate the big picture and constraints that fly in from every angle from my point of view as well. Apparently it’s not that big a deal to get something like this tagged by an electrician, as we will be doing with the Merakis being brought in by Lachlan and Nathaniel in order to make the lobby network work as well as it possibly can.

I’m pretty sure at this stage then that this is the way it will be at the conference this year. The good news is that the workshops will have wifi this time around - a first thanks to iburst - and thanks to twitter we’ll all be immersed in the backchannel, albeit metered out in 140 character increments. Thanks so much to Mark, Stephen, Gary and Nathaniel in particular for sharing their knowledge and experience with us on this, it really got us thinking about how important and useful it would be to extend the network.

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