Sheraton struggles to cope with conference's bandwidth hunger

MANY PARTICIPANTS agree: the internet link at Cordoba's Sheraton Hotel which hosted the Triple Play SC 2007 conference was almost useless during peak times.

As a scribbler and someone carrying both a full size notebook and also a Nokia N800, I wanted to access Wi-Fi and send information from the event. After two hours trying repeatedly to send an email with five attached photos from the show, I gave up. Ant the photos were resized to 499p wide and each had around 150 KBytes. I wasn't alone. I INQuired persons nearby: "it's slow", was the common diagnosis. "It's asking for login repeatedly, it drives me nuts" -said someone else scribbling on a PalmOne PDA.

Hotel's forced authentication gave GMail the fits when sending several attached files at once

Checking the IP address provided by the hotel's network revealed that it uses Telecom Argentina's Arnet as its ISP, as the IP address shown by whatismyipaddress.com was resolved to a telecom.net.ar host name. Something was clear: the hotel's bandwidth wasn't enough to keep up with the demand from regular hotel guests, plus the 700+ people which attended the event.

Wi-Fi coverage was nice, in fact, I could see about a dozen of hotspots. There was one at the lobby, clearly identified as "Sheraton Cba LB", another one at the hallways connecting the conference rooms, and then one Access Point at every conference room, identified by number. So there were plenty of hotspots. The problem wasn't that, it was the bandwidth. The connection was slow as molasses, specially when sending information, and several people around me confirmed it.

Plenty of hotspots, but connection was slow as molasses at peak hour

When that didn't cause trouble -say casual news browsing- the problem was another, the access point referred you by default to a "login" page -a forced proxy- that intercepted any http request and asked for user name and password, which was creatively set as the same word in both instances - so much for security. Well, that forced authentication apparently set a cookie or in the browser or other such scheme, but it didn't last much, sooner or later you found yourself asked to re-login. This caused AJAX applications like Google's GMail to fail miserably sooner or later.

The only way you could send a message with GMail was to attach files to the message one by one, clicking on "save draft" every time. As soon as you wanted to attach several files at once, the browser went into lala-land and the sending would stall, and if you hit reload, you were greeted with the Sheraton's login page, once again. VOIP was also impossible to use for me. A VOIP softphone client was installed and while I used it reliably at my hotel, trying to use it from the Sheraton was an exercise in frustration, it did log-in to the server, but as soon as I attempted to dial any number, the connection would stall, not even hearing a ringing tone.

Myself struggling with it all. I finally gave up. Strangely my VOIP softphone didn't work either

These problems were confirmed by a friend who was also a host at the Sheraton -as he can afford it since he's not a freelance hack. His words were: "I had trouble sending mail several times". He says he complained at the hotel's front desk and was told to try using a different hotspot, and that things worked acceptably albeit slowly, for a while, then problems returned. "I even bring my own Ethernet cable, I connected my notebook to the RJ45 and.. nothing". He continued: "In my 6th floor room I was able to log-in to the lobby's AP by placing the notebook in an exact location and at the right angle, even while the front desk people told me using Wi-Fi from the rooms was impossible. My conclusion: this service should work better at the Sheraton, don't you think?, even more so at a "Triple Play" conference". His conclusion was lethal "It seems they were stuck at 0.5 play".

A nice venue, despite network overload

I personally don't think the Sheraton was aware of the amount of pressure some 700+ geeks and execs would put in the hotel's network infrastructure. In any case, I'm sure that given the complaints received, they will act quickly and problems like these will be gone at the next edition.µ

See also:
Latin American Triple Play conference grows, challenges Expcomm
Telco exec touts "Five Megahertz" broadband
IPTV not a priority for cable operators
INQ's Visual Guide to Expocomm 2006
Hack finds excuse to snap booth babes @ Expocomm 2005
Expocomm Argentina 2004 beauties snapped