February the 8th 2006 saw a sell out attendance at Carson Systems summit - 'The Future of Web Apps' with 860 attendees filling the Great Hall at Kensington Town Hall - London. One of the requirements for the conference was free wireless internet so that developers, programmers and the like could all access an online wiki set up for the event as well as just surfing the web and sending and receiving emails. Logistically Kensington Town Hall staff provided power for the majority of users so laptops could remain online throughout the day.
"We were given a brief to support 300 or so wireless internet users at the event, all being able to access simultaneously" said Matt O'Donovan WiFi SPARK's Managing Director. "This is a daunting prospect for any IT administrator to get so many different and unknown devices connected to the net, with the prospect of virus, trojans, peer to peer and just plain hacking, we had to be very careful how we provided a solution". He continued, "We implemented an network that was robust and secure, engineered to take double the quoted numbers of users".
Jonathon Davies - WiFi SPARK's Operations Director was responsible for the installation and commented, "The use of the sytem was immediate. From when the doors opened users were logging on and numbers quickly rose to the peak of 404 users on line at one time". "Even Ryan Carson mentioned that this was the only major event he had attended where the WiFi had NOT gone down, so we were very pleased with the results." Davies concluded, "To see Andrew Shorten of Adobe give a live over WiFi demo of Adobe's latest photo sharing app whilst hundreds of other users were logged on demonstrates how well the system performed"
"We were given a brief to support 300 or so wireless internet users at the event, all being able to access simultaneously" said Matt O'Donovan WiFi SPARK's Managing Director. "This is a daunting prospect for any IT administrator to get so many different and unknown devices connected to the net, with the prospect of virus, trojans, peer to peer and just plain hacking, we had to be very careful how we provided a solution". He continued, "We implemented an network that was robust and secure, engineered to take double the quoted numbers of users".
Jonathon Davies - WiFi SPARK's Operations Director was responsible for the installation and commented, "The use of the sytem was immediate. From when the doors opened users were logging on and numbers quickly rose to the peak of 404 users on line at one time". "Even Ryan Carson mentioned that this was the only major event he had attended where the WiFi had NOT gone down, so we were very pleased with the results." Davies concluded, "To see Andrew Shorten of Adobe give a live over WiFi demo of Adobe's latest photo sharing app whilst hundreds of other users were logged on demonstrates how well the system performed"
Technology partner Maypace Systems www.maypace.co.uk supported the event with their Cisco certified professionals and were on hand to support users if required. Maypace also provided load balancing hardware and key network components.
At the end of the conference there had been 404 users log on and use the system. No problems were encountered and the system loading was well within specification. A successful conference with 860 satisfied attendees and a working WiFi network. For the technically minded, here is what was deployed by WiFi SPARK Ltd
- 20 Mb/s load balanced xDSL
- Cisco 1200 series b/g access points on PoE Network
- Custom WiFi SPARK IP Filter Scripts
- Customised login portal
- 2 x SPARK USG-I Radius client and bandwidth management Gateways
- Telkonet IP over PowerLine for dedicated Carson EPOS
- SPARK Enterprise Wireless Management System
- Max Sim Users 404
- User Sessions 627
- Data Transferred total 28,266,189,997 (28.2Gbytes)
- SPARK USG-I Load Average 3.2%
For more information on WiFi SPARK's products please see the solutions section on our website www.wifispark.com or www.maypace.co.uk
