Bandwidth is something attendees expect and event managers require. And unfortunately, for both parties it is scarce. Pity the poor tech guys who are getting hammered by the event managers who are fielding complaints from the attendees who are demanding more bandwidth. At almost every event we have managed or attended, participants come with at least one wireless device and many others have two or three. And that’s on top of all of the event’s wireless needs.
At a recent event I learned that the bandwidth is NOT unlimited. I assumed that it was. I thought that all of that air space was infinite and as long as we had enough repeaters, we could wirelessly talk and compute and communicate forever.
WRONG. The air space fills up with all of those wireless signals, and pretty soon our devices can’t distinguish among them.
The 2.4Ghz frequency has 13 channels to choose from, and only 3 of those channels do not “overlap”, which creates excessive radio frequency interference. Channels that are used need to have as much of a buffer between them as they can, in order to minimize interference and degradation of the signal. This is what we refer to as “room in the air” for the wireless connections. In addition, the 2.4Ghz wireless network space is shared with microwave ovens, AV equipment, Bluetooth devices, etc. It’s a VERY messy space due to the fact it was one of the earlier spaces opened up for public use.
The 5Ghz frequency has 24+ channels to choose from, with larger buffers of separation between each of them, and thus ends up having 8 non-overlapping channels- with better separation than the channels in the 2.4Ghz space. The result of this is that 5Ghz is better suited to handle the large amounts of wireless data being demanded by today’s network user.
More simply put, the 2.4Ghz space is MUCH more limited in its ability to handle large numbers of users and large amounts of data, and the 5Ghz space was engineered with some of those challenges in mind.
The bottom line: The challenge boils down to the fact that devices have not caught up with the latest wireless technology, and the technology they do use was not ever intended to run in the environment we have in an arena or in an Expo.
The advice from our guru: move to a place with fewer people and try again to access the wireless connection. Chances are very good that it will work.
Thanks for the tip, Mr. O’Gara!
