Tech Conferences Struggle With Technology

The answer is simple. Contract with a site that CAN do wifi. Microsoft, SAP and others manage it OK. To say this was supposed to be E2.0, it kinda makes the event laughable.

One issue with venue-provided wi-fi that I've observed is very often reality does not live up to what is promised or advertised. We see this often enough on the consumer side where the wi-fi in hotels, cafes or conference centers. Common problems include weak signals overall, large dead zones, slow back-haul, crowded channels, poor user registration technology, no support for VPN connections and support for a limited number of simultaneous users. The only real way for an event organizer to know about these issues to see the venues connectivity in action with another event or conference before they sign their contract for the venue. Sadly this is not always possible, and venues use this to their advantage by over-selling what they are truly able or willing to provide. Even in tech conferences the event planner does not have a sufficient technology background to ask the detailed questions about the connectivity on offer. I can tell you from my own experience organizing events that it is also the rare venue sales rep that can truthfully answer technical questions.On top of performance issues are the ludicrous charges many venues apply to make wi-fi available for an event, which basically makes offering connectivity something outside of the financial wherewithal for many organizations.I was at a Gartner conference recently where the wi-fi connectivity was excellent. When I asked the program managers how they pulled this off, they told me that they usually order a fixed line broadband or dedicated access to the Internet and deploy their own wi-fi equipment throughout the venue. This is certainly preferable if the organizers have the technical capability to deploy, manage and support that approach. I would not be surprised to find that many venues will either outright prohibit this approach or claim that they are unable to accommodate the technical requirements for such an approach. When all else fails you can always blame the unions.

It's even harder for conference organizers to wrap their minds around when you consider that attendees of techy conferences like e2conf are using orders of magnitude more bandwidth than attendees of other industry trade shows.I continue to think that anyone attending these things needs to go in with open eyes and *not* expect usable wifi at any time throughout the show. Take a 3g phone and figure out a way to tether your laptop to it.If that won't work, set up a post by email function for your blog (or use posterous) and use a blackberry/iphone/whatever to blog/tweet to your heart's content. You might have trouble sampling the hashtag stream in realtime that way but you can still keep your output level high.

Although we blame the conference organizers, it is the hotels that let us down. Hotels don't understand that internet connectivity has become a utility, like plumbing. They still charge an extra fee for connecting to the internet in your room. At the Westin last year, they installed extra connection spots during E2.0. Someone ripped them out over the course of the year.