Re: IETF63 wireless

On Mar 12, 2005, at 11:39 AM, RL 'Bob' Morgan wrote:
> I don't know how many attendees at IETF 62 tried to use the hotel 
> wireless Internet service, but I did, and it was terrible.  I 
> purchased the week-long service on Sunday, and had to purchase it 
> again several times during the week ("don't worry, we'll fix up the 
> charging" said the front desk, and they did).  On Sunday all the 
> protocols I needed worked (HTTP, IMAP, ssh, SIP, Kerberos, etc), but 
> later in the week anything but HTTP was hit-or-miss (IMAP in 
> particular never worked at all).  I considered complaining to the 
> front desk ("your protocol isn't working, sir?") but it was easier 
> just to go downstairs.
Interesting. I also purchased it for the week, and with the exception 
of one evening when I couldn't get through and went to the wired 
terminal room, the hotel service was the one that worked. Now, 
everything I did was over a VPN, so I didn't test some of the things 
you did, but I certainly had the traffic patterns of those applications 
within my encrypted data stream.
Something that could come out of this discussion that would be 
constructive and helpful might be a set of guidelines for hosts with 
respect to the network. I wonder if we could focus the thread in that 
direction?
What I think we have learned is that flash crowds impact the wireless 
strongly. We found that 802.11a was useful; I'm theorizing, but I would 
guess that has something to do with more capacity and less users. We 
found that 802.11g interacted poorly with 802.11b. Again, theorizing on 
the fly, I'm going to guess that the frequency collision and the fact 
that most people had 802.11b-only WiFi meant that the 802.11g users 
presented little more than a ddos. That can be fixed in two ways: do a 
better job of 802.11b AP placement, if that was the "other" issue, or 
have more of us buy 802.11b/g capable NICs. I think it would be wise if 
the did both - if I can say this without appearing to be casting 
aspersions on the IETF 62 network operation, let's encourage good 
network design, and also encourage IETF participants to bring 
802.11b//g cards.
Another issue may have been (Fred in theory mode again) with the DHCP 
service. I saw a number of cases where folks had trouble getting an 
address, or their address was changed a few moments after it came up, 
or they got one only to have it go away and not be replaced. That 
suggests that somehow the address assignment policy or the server 
software executing it had some problems.
The best bet, I think, would be for the IETF 62 team to put together a 
note (not to this list, but among the appropriate group) detailing the 
issues and making recommendations for future meetings.
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