Is anyone else having trouble connecting to free wifi at the Guthrie?
My colleague and I each have 3 devices and none of them will connect.
Is the wifi infrastructure here really so insufficient, or are we both doing something wrong?
Solved
JNUC 2015 technical issues
+8Best answer by robbrynelsen
Hey everyone-- Rob from JAMF’s IT team here. We’re working with the Guthrie staff to see if anything can be tweaked during the event. They’ve put in a huge effort to improve the quality of service this year, but we’ve also brought in more people and devices than ever before.
Here’s what we know:
They have approximately 45 APs total. If we assume 2000 devices, perfectly distributed throughout the venue, that’s an average of ~45 per AP. In reality we’re probably all on the same 15-20 APs in the main performance and common spaces, meaning an average of 100-130 clients per AP. The Thrust Theater had 1030 devices connected yesterday (600+ on 2.4 Ghz). At those numbers, management frames alone (which happen at a slower data rate) can consume the available airtime.
While the individual subnets are /22s, the Guthrie’s IT team reports that they have multiple subnets in a superscope configuration (to facilitate roaming via a single L2 vlan) and that IP address shortages should not be an issue, assuming you can associate.
The venue has a 200 Mbps (symmetrical) connection, and we’re getting 170 Mbps of it. We’ve been saturating our allocation throughout the event, but they have QoS policies and bandwidth management/shaping (not sure on the flavor) to help with this. Even though the per-client allocation would be under 200 Kbps, I was able to pull 5-10 Mbps down and push 20-30 Mbps up yesterday (once associated).
The best thing we can do right now is try and reduce the number of devices competing for the RF. Turn off hotspots, unneeded devices, etc. Echoing georgecm12’s comment-- tether with a cable (and turn wifi completely off) if you can. Also, pause/disable CrashPlan, Dropbox, Box Sync, Google Drive, etc during the day.
Totally love the ideas on here (the XR-6000 looks pretty badass). Feel free to stop me in the hallway (or email me @jamfsoftware.com) with any questions, feedback, tech data, or additional ideas for the venue IT staff. You guys rock.
+27@rob.brynelsen Great response, thanks for that! Yet another example of why I love JAMF and JAMFNation so much. A bunch of good ideas all around! So next year 2.5k devices ;-)
+36Wi-Fi Explorer shows seven 5GHz nodes. No problem connecting in fully packed main stage.
Right-click to show in new window, to get closer view.
+6Regardless of what the Guthrie folks say, @rob.brynelsen, they did not have enough available IP's yesterday with the /22 subnet, supernetted or not. However, overnight it seems they changed their subnet to a /21, doubling the number of available IP's. Much better.
And, better late than never, though I (and probably others) pointed out the insufficient available IP's at last year's JNUC:
https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=12318#responseChild71429
It's a herculean effort to satisfy so many geeks, thanks for improving! :)
+2Sorry I missed this years JNUC. Last year was tough getting an IP for sure. Even with the change to a /21, the 200Mbps connection seems archaic (of course I'm not paying their bill) and don't forget the OP said, "My colleague and I each have 3 devices..." That's 6 IPs for 2 attendees. I'm not so sure that Rob's estimate is high enough. I hope to see you and lots of IPs next year!
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