And the problem was that multiple requests my IT person made to get and review such configurations prior to the conference were ignored in favor of “we have this much bandwidth; we can support ‘x’ number of users.” Don’t you worry, pat, pat, pat.”

Shelley re: Comment #7: yes, indeed.

Sluggish, yes. As bad as it was? Hmm.

The fact that advertisers were willing to make a substantial investment in something with a very short track record speaks to their understanding of the reason we all were there. Many women would not have been able to attend if the price had included everything provided, sans swag.

I was impressed with how low-key they were. I’ve been to conferences where advertisers ran each and every session with utterly unbalanced presentations. That was not the case here.

Having pitches is a small price in exchange for the value received. I dealt with my opinion on the Mena Trott thing on my blog, so I won’t rehash it here, but it seems to me that all this high-profile criticism has a personal tinge to it. (BTW, I’m a Wordpress user, not Typepad)

Besides, I now want a Saturn Sky.

The hotel owes it to the customer to spend $5000 and get a short term lease and installation of a DS3 pipe to an Internet Service Provider with a high speed link to the NAP or to otherwise configure so as to avoid that gateway bottleneck in-house.

The conference organizer owes it to the venue to explain that need up front and get that need met with substantial penalties for non-performance.

The conference organizer owes it to the venue to explain that need up front and get that need met with substantial penalties for non-performance.

If you can’t do that in Silly Valley, where can you do it?

Networks are built on a statistical “usage” model. The Hotel network is probably fine for standard situations… but when the Hotel is full of leading edge network consumers that network will fail due to unanticiapted network loads.

We’re going to see this effect and most conferences since every user can get a 45Mbit wireless pipe and the whole network often joins the internet over a T1 (1.5Mbit) link. Those links into the big cloud are very expensive.

By jumping up the client link spped (and expectation) to the 10Mb, 45Mb and soon to be higher speeds we’ve created a recipe for frustration and the potential to bury the backbone networks with millions of video, audio and large zip file downloads all automated by aggregators.

So, cut the Hotel a little slack and re-think the problem… it will happen over and over until these large file downloads are re-engineered to use excess bandwidth and not be a first class service on a shared network. Where’s the IETF when you need something fixed?
Maybe they are already fixing it and I’m just Clueless ‘n See-Addled.

The big story at the previous GnomeDex was the failure of the WiFi. WiFi isn ‘t the problem… it’s the impedance mismatch between LAN speeds and WAN speeds. Corporate Network Czar’s just make large file tranfers illegal over a shared pipe. Hotel’s just let the traffic congest and
say “That’s odd… it usually works just fine”.

Blogher did start as a grassroots movement last year. The cross-over to profit, especially considering the rather unusual amount of sponsor presence at the conference, may end up generating a lot of questions it might be best to answer now rather than later. You don’t have to, you’re a LLC and don’t have a public stock offering. And people don’t begrudge you three from making a living from the Blogher LLC.

But it did start as a grassroots movement, and I think that may lead to some confusion.

Just a suggestion.