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Marriott IT Exec Shares Network Horror Story

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the waps-that-kill-ip-layers-run-amok dept.

alphadogg writes "Neil Schubert is only partly kidding when he calls Marriott International's move toward a converged network a horror story. 'I'm here to tell you a terrifying tale of network design, support and administration,' he said at an IT conference in Boston, referring to a major bandwidth crunch caused by guests wielding Slingboxes and other network devices that overran the hotel chain's outdated network. 'One of the things we've learned about our guest networks is we have one of the most foreign, hostile environments known to man in the network administration world ... I can take 100,000 customers a night on that infrastructure and we actually have less incidents of harm than we do on our corporate back-office infrastructure.'"

7 of 98 comments (clear)

  1. hurm? by spazmonkey · · Score: 5, Funny

    So what was the point of that article again? I must have missed it. Perhaps the PR flak who subbed it could explain it to me. I want that two minutes of my life back now /.

    1. Re:hurm? by CrazyJim1 · · Score: 5, Funny

      And here I was hoping the comments would be exciting to make up for my boredom reading that article.

      --
      God spoke to me.
  2. weilding slingboxes? by ChiChiCuervo · · Score: 5, Funny

    I just get this mental image I'm not going to be able to shake....

    "Some call it a slingbox, I call it appleTV. nnnngggggghhhh"

  3. This is more typical than horrifying to me... by kungfoolery · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The business units of most organizations typically make promises to their customers without comprehending or even considering the IT implications. Account Executive to customer: "Sure! We can provide you and your thousands of users seamless B2B connections from your network to ours wirelessly from any global location!" Account Executive to IT department: "Ok, you guys figure out how to do that."

  4. Re:One lesson from the article... by timmarhy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    that's what marketing do dumby! they make outrageous claims then handball it to technical, and when technical can't make the impossible happen marketing make it look like the techies failed. marketing will then tweak their bullshit slightly to cover their own ass's and make it look like they saved the day.

    --
    If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
  5. Unrealistic convergence plan by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Placing all access points in a single telecom closet for what are generally rather spacious properties requires that 2.4 GHz signals be carried through coaxial cable that is very lossy at that frequency - it might be fair to expect up to 90% of the signal to be lost in the wire. There is an FCC limit on the transmitted power, and even if you manage to boost that at the antenna you will be boosting noise as well. And this attenuation and noise will of course hurt receiving too. This is in general going to result in lower wireless quality than desired, much lower than possible.

    Instead, get zero-management access points that do not do NAT, routing, etc, and treat them just like antennas once you set the SSID. Do the protocol processing in the telecom closet with a higher grade of hardware than consumer equipment. Cache DNS and web transfers there. Work with Slingbox to engineer channel aggregation with multicasting that bypasses the home units while transmitting the same programming, because so many of those folks are watching the same sports game. I can think of some interesting approaches to the possible legal issues with Slingbox aggregating channels, no doubt they can as well. Can an in-house video alternative be made as attractive as Slingbox? That's another solution.

    Bruce

    --
    Bruce Perens.
  6. Astroturf? by UESMark · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This seems like a thinly veiled ad for Marriot internet access.