Re: [93attendees] Hilton Guest Room Internet Update

["George, Wes" <[e-mail]>]

Jim, NOC folks current and past, first let me express how much I
appreciate all of the work you do at making the best of what is often a
very bad situation, in front of a demanding audience.

We were talking the other day in the Captive Portal BoF about ways to make
WiFi suck less for your average user, and it occurred to me that while
captive portals certainly contribute to this, the larger issue is the way
that WiFi networks are built and "maintained", especially when they are at
the limits of their scale. We've all had numerous experiences with really
awful "managed" infrastructure WiFi in public places, airports, hotels,
other conferences, etc. where the system was simply overwhelmed by the
demand or unable to overcome the implementation flaws, so we know that
this is a common problem.
I think that there would be real value in you and some of your fellow
AP-wranglers writing an informational Internet Draft discussing some of
the challenges you've faced and best practices you have learned while
beating wifi into submission for a high-density installation and intensive
user base over multiple years. I don't have much applicable experience to
turn into useful text myself, so I can only offer to get raw text from
other folks squashed into I-D format as an editor, if that would be
helpful. Are there other folks who think that this would be useful or are
willing to contribute?

Thanks,

Wes



On 7/23/15, 9:03 AM, "93attendees on behalf of Jim Martin"
<[e-mail] on behalf of [e-mail]> wrote:

>Gentlepeople,
>       First of all, I apologize for the delay in getting everyone an update on
>this. We know the guestroom Internet here in the Hilton has been
>problematic at best, and we have been working to try to improve it for
>the last week. As you probably know, the IETF network provides the IP
>layer and above for the guestrooms and public space, but the physical
>layer, both for the wired and wireless uses the existing hotel
>infrastructure. In the case here in Prague, we’ve been working closely
>with the hotel’s vendor, Mikenopa to deliver this service. They’ve been
>very willing and happy to work with us on this.
>
>       For the wireless, we’ve lit up the “ietf-hotel” ssid on the existing
>APs, both in the public space and guestrooms. These are the same APs that
>provide the “hhonors” SSID. While the APs seem to have been originally
>deployed reasonably, there has been hotel building changes (mostly
>regarding new sprinkler systems) which has had them moved around in the
>hallways to very suboptimal locations. This has led to many areas having
>low to no signal. Additionally, their 2.4G channel assignment and power
>levels weren’t optimal. Mikenopa has been trying to move APs and
>reconfigure the channels.
>
>       Additionally, due to our desire to use public IPv4 space, we’ve seen
>very high broadcast loads. This is based in the fact that we’ve got a
>large block that is sparsely used, and thus when we get scanned (as
>happens constantly from the greater Internet) we get a large amount of
>ARP traffic which can overload the wireless system. We’ve been working on
>various techniques to reduce this load.
>
>       On the wired front, we’ve had reasonably good luck (other than about 45
>minutes of downtime last night with a self inflicted wound while trying
>to reduce the ARP load). Please do use the wired connection in each
>guestroom if at all possible. If you need a cable, it’s usually in a
>cloth bag with a “@“ symbol on it in the desk. If you don’t have one,
>please feel free to come to the NOC.
>
>       Overall, we’ve seen the ietf-hotel work reasonably well in the
>restaurant, lobby and hallways, but poorly (but slowly improving) in the
>guestrooms. We continue to work on this, but using the wired connection
>in your room is probably your best bet.
>
>       - Jim


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