Slashdot Mirror
Hacker Conventions Ranked By Bandwidth-Per-Visitor
An Anonymous Coward writes "Ever wondered how much bandwidth you will get at a hacker con? This web page tells you how much. It shows the total bandwidth and bandwidth for each visitor for all the recent hacker cons." It looks like Defcon attendees get the short end of the stick, while those at metarheinmain chaosdays are practically swimming in bandwidth. There are a lot of other cons (a few examples listed here) which I'd like to see added to this list.
You'd have to be pretty crazy and/or desperate to risk using the provided bandwidth at DefCon (or any hacker con) for that matter. Regardless of how much faith you may have in the people running the network, you're surrounded on all sides by people who would like nothing more than to steal your information. While at DefCon, stay away from the ATMs and if at all possible stay away from the network entirely.
Color me stupid, but I don't understand why anyone would care how much bandwidth per atendee is available at a hacker convention. You don't got to *do* hacking, you go to learn about hacking from people in the same building (thus requiring little to no B/W). And from what I have heard about Defcon you are best to not bring any of your own devices at all, lest you end up hacked yourself and on the wall of shame.
Location plays a major part in how much bandwidth is going to be available. Beyond being just dependent on the ISP based on location and what companies are available there, you also have to look at which building it is being held in. DEFCON may have gotten the short end of the stick because the owners of the building they used would only allow so much. Not that a lot is needed (at least in comparison to how many participants are there)... nobody exactly goes to DEFCON to torrent an HD movie.
"The best way to accelerate a Macintosh is at 9.8m/sec^2" -Marcus Dolengo
Would you use the provided internet connection? Seriously?
...BiMonSciFiCon?!? of all the cons, that is obviously the most important
i've had just about enough of your vassar bashing.
It'd be interesting to see the bandwidth statistics for the annual ACM SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference. With tens of thousands of visitors and thousands of full-conference attendees (a huge portion of which are on their laptops all week), I've yet to see a SIGGRAPH conference that didn't bring a convention center's networking to its knees (as well as most surrounding hotel networks). Of course, the per-person bandwidth is relatively low with so many users, but it would be interesting to see the statistics throughout the week regardless.
Especially for such a massive conference that is accustomed to the sustained high-tech audio/video load and with organizers that try to anticipate the high-usage (and have a corresponding budget to prepare), I suspect that there are considerably more bits transferred during SIGGRAPH than most any other conference through sheer size alone.
Cheers!
Sean
It's a number to obsess about, like GHz and Megapixels. It's also completely meaningless.
I'm sorry, 13gbit/s at 24c3? I find that rather hard to believe.
I was too slow! Goddamn this lousy con wifi access!
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Anybody know what software they used to produce that chart?
The combination of spreadsheet data right alongside the bar graph looks really handy. I wouldn't mind having that ability for some upcoming reports and presentations.
time to finally move to the rhein-main area
605413? Yes, it's a prime.
well it could be , because the 2 conformance are in different countries . lol , if you r going to compare , make if fair
Ummm, it's a hacker convention- Why would they purchase their own bandwidth when there's wireless in the office above?
Sounds like they forgot about the oldest running hacker conference, Pumpcon, held every year in Philly since about 1987... I guess it's too underground (less than 200 people show up every year) -- although the who's who of the hacker world has probably been there at some point, no doubt.
We dont pay for our bandwidth... We get it for free and even the largest german internet provider asks us if they could peer with us.
Here I thought "bandwidth" was an euphemism for something worth ranking, and it's just a list of how many bits went in and out....
Well the high bandwidth conferences usually stream all their talks as high-quality video into the net.
I have no idea why bandwidth is seen as such a scarse resource in your country. The congresses usually get their bandwidth for free. I mean it's just a few gigabits for a few days, ISPs donate that to balance their peering agreements.
Well the problem probably lies in the image of hackers. I mean in germany, the CCC made a good name by talking publicaly about sensitive political issues and showing the dangers. Also by showing that certain "ohh we are so secure"-systems are completely insecure after all, etc. And of course the occational "fun, but everybody likes it" project like Blinkenlights.
What you guys in the US need is some kind of hacker association like the CCC. I mean 2600 is already quite nice, but it's commercial and therefore cannot do certain things like publishing all their issues on the web. And it's just a magazine, no institution.
The european congresses often get their bandwidth for free or almoust for free.
I've been running the network at ToorCon for the past several years (configs here), and the first year (before I was really helping out at all) we hung the entire con off a Ricochet 56Kbps wireless modem. :) We've had point-to-point wifi links and gigabit drops from hotels, but the last several years at the San Diego Convention Center, we've been using primarily donated EVDO cards as uplinks - mainly because SDCC wants $10,000 per diem for wired network access, with a stipulation of no NAT (making it useless for a conference LAN). This year we'll be running multiple EVDO uplinks load-balanced with OpenBSD; the goal is to have the speed of a wired uplink with the flexibility of cellular access.
If you happen to be at the con, stop by the NOC and say hi.
illum oportet crescere me autem minui
https://events.ccc.de/camp/2007/Fahrplan/attachments/1348-Camp07-NetworkStats.pdf (the line had at least 300MBit for 1800 attendees ) Hope Number Six had a 45mb uplink, but only 10mb was used due to a bad cable connection and roughly 3000 attendees straight from network operator from the convention) someone can contact dragorn on nycwireless.net or watch the closing ceremonies of the last hope for the specs this year
The amount of available bandwidth per visitor at any given hacker convention should be calculable as follows: ABPVAAGHC= [The amount of available free wireless networks in the area]* [The average bandwidth of those networks]/[The number of attendees at that convention] They're hackers...why would they have their own service?
It says "1.024 kbits/person" for an event (gpn7) that had 100 Mbit/s and 100 visitors. Last time I checked, 1 Mbit = 1000 Kbit. It's just that - 1000, not 1024. And they can't even use "." right.