There is a bit of schadenfreude going on over the problems with WiFi at the WebSummit in Portugal. I am amused at this. It is a total red herring. I have been to a lot of big tech events in the last year or two. Huge ones like Mobile World Congress (MWC), and CES which have about 100,000 attendees. These are serious tech events, that have been running for years. And the wifi doesn’t work there either.

I am heavily involved in the planning for our presence at MWC 2017. A few weeks ago I had a discussion with the guy responsible for our floor demos. In jest I said I wanted him to allocate me space for something 50m long, 10m high, which would need 4MW of power. His only reaction was:

“Will it need WiFi? As long as it doesn’t need WiFi anything is possible”

The reality is WiFi is not designed to handle massive numbers of concurrent users as you get at huge trade shows. When you put thousands of people on the same limited amount of shared spectrum it will go down.

Perhaps Paddy Cosgrove actually believes WiFi is an issue. I think it is far more likely that the reason he took his circus on the road was it had outgrown Dublin. There is no conference venue in the city that can take 80,000 people. The RDS was a cobbled together option that had reached it’s capacity and was barely suitable. I have seen proper conference setups in Las Vegas, Barcelona, Austin, London, San Francisco. They are purpose built for these things. And they look nothing like repurosed 19th century show grounds.

It Dublin wants to attract the big tech events (and I think it can) then a real conference venue (start with something capable of handling 50,000 attendees, served by rail links) is needed. And not gloating over an ongoing tech problem that can’t be solved anyway.

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