The Brainshare wireless network has been nearly unusuable a lot this week. Today we learned why that is. Apparently Laura Chappell was in the Wednesday keynote and did some monitoring. There were 1900 wireless devices contending for the few APs in there. And in her Bring Your Own Laptop class, there were 375 devices contending for the very same AP.
With loads like that... It looks to me like we're running right up to the limit of 802.11b (the flavor in use around here) by having so many geeks with wireless around. I do wonder if there is a way to engineer around loads like that. It doesn't help that a lot of the wireless cards around here are in 'soft-AP' mode and are acting as repeaters for the hardware APs, and thus scrambling the channels even more.
The number of hardwire connections is under 20, and they seem to be in near constant use.
With loads like that... It looks to me like we're running right up to the limit of 802.11b (the flavor in use around here) by having so many geeks with wireless around. I do wonder if there is a way to engineer around loads like that. It doesn't help that a lot of the wireless cards around here are in 'soft-AP' mode and are acting as repeaters for the hardware APs, and thus scrambling the channels even more.
The number of hardwire connections is under 20, and they seem to be in near constant use.