Web Directions

Wifi at Web Directions South this year — latest news

• In: Blog
• By:Maxine
• September 10, 2008
• Leave a response

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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