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IETF Attendees Reengineer Their Hotel's Wi-Fi Net
alphadogg writes "What happens when a bunch of IETF super nerds show up in Paris for a major conference and discover their hotel's Wi-Fi network has imploded? They give it an Extreme Wi-Fi Makeover. Members of the Internet Engineering Task Force, who gathered for the outfit's 83rd meeting this week in France, discovered as they arrived at the Hotel Concorde Lafayette that the Wi-Fi was flakey and became flakier still as scores more attendees arrived and tried to connect, and the wired net was having issues of its own. Working behind the scenes, a team of IETF attendees negotiated with the hotel and were granted access to the wireless network, and began rigging up all sorts of fixes, which even included taping a Nexus S phone to a ceiling and turning off the radios on numerous access points to reduce noise."
"There was no WiFi signal when on the desk in front of the window in my room, but after some experiments, I discovered that the signal was quite good... on the ceiling of the bathroom," emailed Marc Petit-Huguenin.
"I have a Nexus S phone, so I taped it on the ceiling of the bathroom, and used tethering over Bluetooth to bridge the gap to the desk," he explained. This is a slow connection, but good enough to send emails over SMTP or use vi [the popular Unix text editor] over SSH."
FTA
Someone please explain the usefulness of taping a phone to the ceiling to me.
It's part of the IPv7 protocol. Don't worry, you'll see them release a paper next week on it...and I'm sure industry will get right on implementing that...sometime in 2037.
In other news, it was reported that part of the re-engineering of this Wi-Fi network was implementing IPv6...unfortunately, they could find no one outside of the IETF super nerds who knew what the hell it was for...
Oh come on, why does it have to be useful? The hotel let us do it! (I'm guessing that it had a USB ethernet dongle, but I wasn't there, so I don't know for sure.)
I feel very fortunate that a majority of my business travel is to IETF meetings, because this is the only time that I ever experience functional internet in a hotel. It can be pretty fantastic--in Hiroshima, the WIDE team rewired _all_ of the IETF hotels, which is about five different hotels. In almost every IETF since Seoul, the IETF NOC has provided the connectivity for the conference hotel for the duration of the conference, and the connectivity has been excellent.
It's too bad that hotels can't afford to pay IETF geeks to fix their connections on a more general basis, and that there isn't a commercial provider that's able to provide a similar level of service for a price hotels can afford. Sometimes I think we ought to have an independent hotel WiFi rating service, so that hotels would have to actually compete on the basis of the quality of their Internet service.
I don't know if what they did qualifies as jury-rigged. They basically mapped out the entire network and assigned RF channels and power levels so that adjacent floors would not interfere with each other. Seems like whoever installed it before just threw up an access point in every other room and left it on full power. What the IETF guys are doing is certainly not totally optimized yet but it's a big improvement over what was there before.
I like what I've read in the article so far. One of the mantras of ham radio is use as little power as possible to communicate. I love that these guys were smart enough to turn off some access points entirely, to reduce receiver sensitivity and transmitter power. It seems they reduced the number of access points to 3... one for each non-overlapping channel. Great!
Because they are a Hotel, and don't give a shit if their network is flaky. They have been using Microsoft products for more than a decade, so when things sometimes work and sometimes don't, then that is just them darn computers behaving flaky as always.
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You know those 802.11 wireless standards implemented in just about every wireless network device in the world? These guys wrote them. Literally. Rest assured they understand what they're doing.
You have a point about future support, but characterizing them as just a bunch of guys with badges who barely have a clue makes you seem ignorant.
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You know, you could have politely pointed out my error like yincrash did above, but chose not to. Now I'm going to have to get medieval on your ass. When dealing with the pain, please remember you brought this on yourself.
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Prithee consider the comeliness of thine words, lest good folk consider thee knavish.
Thou art an embossed carbuncle.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
Having all hotels provide connectivity suitable for a LARGE group of internet junkies is financially stupid.
Most hotels have adequate coverage for their normal guest load, so they use the cheapest provider capable of providing that adequate coverage.
No other event in the hotel is going to require the connectivity perfection that an IETF conference is going to require, its a waste of money for them to engineer and build out an IETF compatible network. Its far simpler to get some joe the plumber from the PCGuys Shop down the street to throw in a DSL line and enough APs that no one bitches, and for the most part, works just fine.
Not every hotel NEEDS that kind of connectivity. For instance the hotel I went to for my wedding had absolutely shitty connectivity and if you asked they would politely respond, aren't you here for your wedding sir? And they were right :) Disney has absolutely shitty connectivity and their response is rather atypical for Disney in that it is intentionally bad, you're not supposed to be dicking around on the Internet at Disney.
They also don't need to pay for DS3 or so of bandwidth for the hotel if it isn't filled with bandwidth hogs (which I actually doubt the IETF are, probably the opposite but just making a point.)
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No, these guys are really, really good. They know what they are doing, and have been doing it, successfully, for several years. For several years before that, we didn't do so well. These guys have all the tools, and mostly, the experience. They can do it quick, and work within the constraints of the existing system. A regular network consulting company would take a couple of weeks, do a poorer job, insist a lot of new equipment is needed and charge an arm and a leg, which is why the hotel didn't do it. In a few hours they mapped the network, analyzed the configuration, designed a new plan, deployed it, tested it, and made it work. They did it on a product line they had not dealt with before. It was very impressive.
The actual fun issue is: they logged all the original state. They have a tool that maintains the entire configuration. They can leave it in one of two conditions: exactly the way it was before they changed everything, or in the state it is now. The hotel can make that choice.
The IETF basically re-engineers the Hotel's network every place they meet. The big difference is, sometimes they get permission to do this before the meeting, and sometimes (as here in Paris), they don't get this permission until after the Hotel's network melts down.
(By the way, I am at the meeting, and I heard that the Hotel's IT head has now been fired. This is not too surprising when one of the major fixes was to turn off
the majority of the access points.)
I would so watch that show! Every week, they take us to a company to look over their pathetic network and re-do it properly and with moar power. I can see it now...the teary-eyed IT manager is brought in to see his new network...it'd be like Bob Vila for geeks.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.