When you are at a conference it is often really tough to have a smooth ride wrt wireless.
One of the key factors in my experience has been, that top notch stable networks are:
Sponsored by Nortel (or Linksys, or insert other company)
rather than:
Sponsored by [A non networking company]
James Duncun Davidson was talking about the challenges of setting up a conference WiFi setup.
There are issues such as how multicast on a WiFi network becomes N unicast messages. DHCP itself is multicast, so you can easily get into network storms if you are unlucky. You probably shouldn’t give leases for 2 years out to the nodes either…
Also, 802.11b screws up things, so a lot of places try to have two seperate networks for b and g.
Interesting challenges. WiFi is the #1 thing I look for at a conference (I don’t care about the food, or the back-pack!). Hopefully next TSSS will have a less frustrating situation ;)