Why our WiFi worked…

Written on 21st April 2009                                                                                                              7 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

Heat Map of Wi-Fi strength

People expect a wireless network and connectivity at a web conference. And they expect it to work too. unfortunately it usually doesn’t. Every edition of The Next Web Conference suffered from some problems. This year, it was almost perfect.

It was so perfect that I publicly offered to make the Wi-Fi work at leWeb in paris next year. It famously didn’t work last year even though Loïc reportedly spent over 100.000 Euros on it. We spent a little more than 5.000 so I offered to provide working Wi-Fi for 50.000 in Paris.

This is what the setup looked like last week:

• We provided almost 50 workplaces with fixed ethernet and power connections. We also provided ethernet cables for everyone to use. This means that the heaviest users switched to cable.
• Average number of simultaneous WiFi users was an average 130 (all day) with peaks of more than 150 users.
• WiFi limits were set at 10Mbps down and 5Mbps up – no limits on fixed ethernet
• Around 50GB of data was transferred over wireless in the main hall
• Wireless was provided with a managed WiFi setup (Ruckus) and 8 APs in the main hall
• Wireless in the nearby rooms was provided with 3 extra APs
• Average signal strength per client was 75%
• Bandwidth usage peaks were at 80Mbps
• There were about 20-30 rogue WiFi devices visible at any given other than our managed WiFi setup (other APs, phones, ad-hoc networks etcetera)

Early in the morning on Thursday the technicians (@eventengineers and @mdbraber!) found a small error in the DHCP settings which they were eager to fix. As they rebooted the system the company handling the Fibre optic cables decided to unplug a bunch of cables to clean things up. It took a while to find out that the DHCP settings were fine and to persuade the Internet provider to reconnect the cables. Fortunately the downtime was short and easily fixed. (more…)

Bandwidth, broadband, conferences, heatmap, leweb, set-up, thenextweb09, tnw, tnw09, Wi-Fi, wifi

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Proposed Photoshop CS5 Interface: Hyperrealism

Written on 7th November 2008                                                                                                              13 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

Did you stare at it for a while? See what it is? Yes, a hyper-realistic version of Adobe Photoshop CS4. It was made for an online software seller by an ad agency. You can see the whole process of rebuilding the Photoshop interface in a set on Flickr.

adobe, CS4, CS5, photgraphy, Photoshop, set-up, software-asli.com

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