Tummy

Last year I brought a prepaid Verizon Jetpack to a meeting we organized at the Ritz Carlton Orlando. It was a hit, but could only support 10 users at a time.

This year like last, the hotel wants to charge us $1,000 per day for wifi for our meetings and so I was asked to bring my jetpack again, but support possibly 100 connections from our execs. That would potentially save us several thousand dollars over 6 days. A drop in the bucket for a $900k meeting, but several thousand here and there add up to real money.

So I got a Cradlepoint MBR1400 router which lets me plug in my Jetpack and share it with up to 128 simultaneous users.

With that many users, even checking email will burn through 10gb of data possibly everyday or every couple hours and I will have to be constantly monitoring and refilling it in addition to my real job.

Does anyone have a suggestion of a better plan on how we can do this? Our IT will not cooperate and are clueless. Thanks!

gfunkdave

Sounds like it's time for new IT!

What will your expected data use with Verizon cost? If it'll be close to $1000 then I'd just go with the hotel's solution since there will be much less headache for you - and if it doesn't work you'll have someone else there to take care of it.

If it were me in charge of the meeting, I wouldn't nickel and dime things. $6000 to support a $900k meeting is just a cost of doing business. Besides, I can't imagine that 100 simultaneous users will get a satisfactory connection from a mifi.

javabytes

Honestly? Don't do it. I doubt you're going to have success with 100 users attempting to share a single Jetpack connection. Verizon's average LTE speeds are what, 25Mbps? That's going to mean speeds only slightly better than dial-up, taking Cradlepoint at their word that the router can actually handle 128 simultaneous users. It might be able to connect 128 simultaneous wi-fi clients, but still strain under the load of routing all the traffic they generate.

For some quick, back of the napkin math, I'd estimate a typical, full day of internet use runs somewhere around 250 megabytes per user, not including data intensive activities such as streaming music or video. That's 25 gigabytes a day for 100 users. So my guess is you'll have to refill at least twice during the day. My understanding is Verizon charges $90 for 10 gigabytes, thus 150 gigabytes over the course of the conference would run $1,350. This in addition to what you paid for the router - $300? $400? So let's say $1,750 all in, not counting your time.

Also, what's going to happen when the meeting is over? Are those execs going to go back to their rooms and do without wi-fi, or are they going to log on and buy a session? If you pay the hotel the $1,000/day for the wi-fi, would that give the execs access in their rooms during the evening too?

I understand why they want you to try it. $1,000 a day sounds like a big number for something that everybody takes for granted. If you decide to go the Jetpack route, I'd make sure you can still use the hotel wi-fi as a backup if it doesn't work. Hotel wi-fi often isn't fantastic, but they'll at least shoulder the burden of making sure it's set up and working throughout your event. I wouldn't want to be the stand-in IT guy for the day in a room full of execs where the internet isn't working, especially where you don't have an alternative.

IMO, not wanting to pay them the extra few thousand to have everything working may be penny wise, pound foolish. They're already spending $900k on this meeting, why jeopardize productivity trying to save less than half a percent of the event cost on internet?

Tummy

Our IT is spectacularly bad except at spending many hundreds of millions on our current SAP implementation.

The meetings are already something like $50k over budget due to some unplanned attendees and additional "entertainment" related expenses so they are looking to cut as much as possible. Internet in the meeting room is not a requirement since they want people to pay attention, but is nice to have at least during breaks.

Last year we tried the hotel's wifi and many people were not happy with the performance and the need to login constantly with the popup. I was getting 45 mbps download/~25 mbps upload from the Jetpack over LTE and it was actually many times faster than the hotel with a lot less latency. Since there are only going to be around 120 people in the room at any one time, only a fraction of those will actually connect. I would think less than half.

Tummy

That $1k covers the meeting rooms only. Charges for room, travel and incidentals go to their own cost center, so not our problem.

Thanks for the advise, I can see it blowing up, but I was clear with the team that this is experimental, not my primary job, and hotel wifi is always available as a fallback.

javabytes

If this is just a nice to have, especially for during the breaks, then by all means go for it. That makes more sense. As for advice on how to do it, I think you've got it covered. I don't see how you could improve the system further without making it more complicated than it's worth.

Dubai Stu

I would probably get two connections if your Cradlepoint would support it, implement quality of service?

It may be too late, but have you considered a Peplink router instead. It supports bonding, more sophisticated user policies, and load balancing?

http://www.evdoinfo.com/content/view/3897/63/


Millenicom has a 20 gig Verizon no contract plan for $89.

ScottC

Cradlepoint has similar and more reliable products. Not a fan of Peplink as their firmware has presented several problems in recent years for me. Their bonding also requires a VPN on the other end to "unbond".

I use Cradlepoint AER 2100 with dual modems. Their latest supports XLTE where available, and I use external antennas on them.

Dubai Stu

I own several Cradlepoint products and like them very much. My usage is personal or at least less than 10 people at a time. His proposed number of users scared me and it sounded like these meetings were a semi-regular event. I was concerned that one bandwidth pig could create a problem for him. Cradlepoint does have some QOS. How would you tweak it Scott?

boberonicus

I'd advise you to check your hotel contract to see what it says about using your own WiFi and bypassing the hotel's WiFi service.

ScottC

It is very simple to setup bandwidth restrictions on the various SSID's - I can setup "exec" SSID's with no restrictions, and guest ones where I limit speeds. It also supports third party radius servers like hotspotcentral allowing you to generate voucher codes or even paid access.

With 2 AER2100's, I ws able to run 140 people comfortably, but that was on XLTE, external antennas and dual modems per unit.

Dubai Stu

Sort of point to this -- Marriot just got nailed jamming personal hotspots:

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/a63d6...g-guests-wi-fi

boberonicus

Wild. And an interesting article, thanks for posting. But what I was referring to are hotel contracts that (sometimes) stipulate that you can't provide WiFi access for conference attendees within their facility. And breaching that agreement can have specific contractual penalties.

Error 601

Contrary to conventional wisdom, I have never experienced much push-back on this subject. Most hotels know their Wi-Fi is horrendous and if you're doing your own thing it's one less thing to complain about.

It just comes down to what connectivity is available at the venue. The hardest problem is usually just getting useful information from hotel management who probably has no idea who their fiber provider is for instance.

We have done this really, really simplistically. A 250 Megabit connection, an x86 firewall with gigabit uplink, Dual-band access points called "Boys" and "Girls" on non-conflicting channels. We asked users to connect to the gender appropriate network and to use the 2.4GHz network if their birthday was between January and June and the 5GHz network if their birthday was between July and December.

The only issue we have had with this arrangement is the external IP address got blocked by Google for excessive traffic and users had to enter a captcha.