PDC2008 sets benchmark for Wireless Connectivity
Many of you who were there at the PDC keynote room might have missed the UFO style devices (in the picture below) from Xirrus. But several of these devices were silently (perhaps a little flashy) and dutifully doing their job in the keynote room.
Pardon my lazy blogging for not saying enough about it at the event as I promised earlier. But this press release from Xirrus will fascinate you.
An industry record was made at PDC as we connected 2,890 concurrent users in a 100,000 square foot keynote hall through Wi-Fi. You can read more on this and the other records that were set by Xirrus here:
We had over 2,000 connections pretty much during every keynote. With such large number of connections, attendees might have noticed how much bandwidth was eaten up. We didn’t use up the entire bandwidth but were over 90% of the capacity most of the times throughout the week. Hopefully that explains why you were getting a slower connection at times, as it was not just you, but thousands of other people on the same network around you.
Our priority was to make sure nothing catastrophic happens as we also had a backup wireless solution if the high-density solution didn’t work out. Thankfully we didn’t ever have to go to our backup Wi-Fi.
Next stop, we’ll think about scaling out High Density devices throughout the conference center and more bandwidth (of course) to make your conference experience better. Now you have one more reason to attend PDC 2009 and other future Microsoft events. So what are you waiting for?