The one thing that people did not like about last year’s Office 2.0 Conference was the poor quality of the network. At the time, the St. Regis Hotel had a 3Mbps connection to the Internet, with a third allocated to hotel rooms, a third to meeting rooms, and a third to public areas. With about 450 attendees, that sure was not sufficient. When we talked to their IT folks earlier this year, they proudly told us that they had doubled their capacity, bringing it to 6Mbps. Needless to say, we were not that impressed, and went looking for a better solution. What we found is almost akin to science fiction, and here is the story of how we got there.

Once word got out that we were on the look out for a temporary Internet connection and a scalable private WiFi network, we got in touch with Eric Norlin, organizer of the SaaScon and Defrag conferences. He got us in touch with some folks working for Swisscom’s Event Solutions division. These guys specialize in the setup of temporary large scale WiFi networks for conference organizers.

Problem was, we were running short on time — remember, the whole conference is organized in just about two months — and Verizon could not provision a land line fast enough. As a result, we had to revert to a fixed wireless solution using a laser beam to provide bandwidth from one building to another. That’s pretty cool, but it requires that you have a clear line of sight — putting aside the occasional bird — between the building that is connected to the metropolitan backbone and the building where the conference is supposed to take place. Unfortunately, after some preliminary site inspection, it turned out that the only company that could give us some bandwidth was Covad, but their building did not have a direct line of sight with the St. Regis. One more hop was required, and it would take the signal to the roof of the St. Regis Hotel’s building, without any available way to bring the signal down to the conference rooms on the second and fourth floors.

As a result, three laser beams were required: one between the roof of Covad’s building and the roof of a building along the way, a second one between the roof of that building and the St. Regis Hotel’s roof, and a third one from the St. Regis Hotel’s roof down to the ninth floor terrace, from which we could finally get access to the hotel’s local area network. If all works as planned we will get at least 45Mbps of bandwidth, just for us online junkies.

From there, we had to find a way to bring this bandwidth to at least 500 people using shiny new Apple iPhones. That’s were Swisscom’s expertise comes into play. Essentially, they will build a massive private WiFi network deployed on the second and fourth floors of the hotel, using no less than 40 base stations and some fancy routers that put everything together, with a dedicated team of three to four technicians. With such a setup, they can pretty much guarantee that nobody will complain too much about the network this year. It’s not cheap, but it should work.

If all works well, everybody will use the same Internet connection, but we will segment it between attendees, presenters, and sponsors. And because we tend to be paranoid about these kinds of things, we’re backing everything up using the hotel’s own Internet connection, allocating 2Mbps for the presenters and 2Mbps for the sponsors. With such a plan, I think we’ll be fine. Knock on wood…

If you want to get share the thrill of this little experiment, make sure to register.

Many thanks to Andy, Doug, and Eric for their help!