By Jason Samuels, Manager of Information Technology, National Council on Family Relations

How important is it for your conference attendees to have access to the internet? We asked this question recently on our post-conference survey and the results were overwhelming:

95.9% of NCFR Conference attendees said that having internet access is at least somewhat important.

What many of your conference attendees don’t realize is just how unaffordable it is to provide blanket wireless access on the meeting room floors at major hotels. A September 2011 industry report published by the Professional Convention Management Association found that respondents spent an average of over $7,000 on internet access, and only 37% provided free WiFi to attendees. Our organization has felt the pinch, spending thousands of dollars in past years on internet access for just our cyber café and registration desk.

The situation

I work for the National Council on Family Relations, the premier professional association for the multidisciplinary understanding of families. Our members are researchers, parent/family educators, college faculty, students, therapists, counselors, and more. They are wonderful people doing amazing work in the world, and they don’t get paid nearly enough for it. Every year our staff works hard to provide 1,000 to 1,200 of them with an annual conference experience that is both world class and affordable.

In the four years that I’ve been responsible for planning and negotiating conference A/V and other technology expenses for NCFR, I’ve had my eye on mobile broadband as a potential lower-cost alternative for providing internet access. We began with a Verizon MiFi 2200 at our registration desk in 2009, and expanded to a trial Free WiFi Zone powered by Clear Spots in 2010. With our 2011 conference hotel in range of both the Clear network and Verizon LTE, I was intrigued by the possibility that this could be the year we took the plunge to rely entirely on mobile broadband for our conference internet needs. When the hotel network services vendor’s bid came in at 30% over last year for 256Kb/s connections, we decided to go for it.

The approach

Our plan of attack going in was to bring nine mobile broadband devices. We already owned a MiFi 2200 and two Clear Spot 4G+, procured two Clear Spots through Mobile Citizen, and purchased four Verizon MiFi 4510L. The plan was to use two to power our cyber café, two to power registration (one as a backup on the alternate network), four for a Free Wi-Fi zone, and the MiFi 2200 for staff. We pinned down the price to place an on-site order with the hotel vendor (just in case), and informed them that we would be happy to work with them if the need arose.

It paid off. The registration desk connection was rock solid. Cyber café was stable after I switched it from two networks to just one Clear Spot. The initial configuration failed due to network conflicts between multiple hotspots and the wired network in place for print sharing. (We provide free printing as a perk to our attendees.) The MiFi 4510L pulled out of the cyber café was turned into a fifth Free Wi-Fi device instead. The Free WiFi Zone was instantly popular, and we realized quickly that demand would be an issue.

A limitation of the mobile broadband devices is that they only allow five connections at any one time (except for the Clear Spot, which allows eight). On the MiFi 4510L and Clear Spot 4G+, an LED display shows you how many are currently connected. We turned our Free WiFi Zone on the afternoon before the official conference opening and watched nearly every available connection light up. That evening, we drove to the nearest Verizon Store and purchased four more MiFi 4510L.

Making it work

My perception through the conference was that we had a little trouble meeting demand during peak periods, a few people had issues connecting, but most people I talked to said it was working great. Between seeing the number of people sitting around the Free WiFi Zone with a laptop or tablet, and watching the number of concurrent connections on the devices’ LED displays, it was clear that people utilized the service. The feedback from our post-conference survey told me a few other things, but more about that in a bit.

Managing the mobile broadband devices under heavy load took some work. During the 2010 trial Free WiFi Zone, a few times a day the Clear 4G+ hotspots locked up and needed to be reset. They nearly always indicated they were stuck trying to switch between 4G and 3G networks, hot to the touch, and sometimes I had to pull the battery for a few seconds to power down. This year, the Clear Spot 4G+ devices seemed more stable (possibly benefitting from a firmware update, sharing the load with more devices, or a bit of each?) and the MiFi 4510L was about on par – a couple of resets were needed through the course of the event.

The standard Clear Spots seemed like the most stable of the devices, though they also seemed to be prone to intermittent slowdowns. I would speculate that both can be traced back to them being our only devices not using a 3G network as a backup. My standard way to check on a device that might have locked up was to connect with my iPod, open the Speedtest.net app, and if it couldn’t ping a server there was probably an issue. Through frequent Speedtest runs, I observed the Clear network typically clocking between 2 and 7 Mb/s down, while Verizon LTE was typically between 6 and 14 Mb/s down. Latency on both networks was higher than I’d expect from a wired network though, with the ping often coming in between 200 and 400 ms – probably a bigger issue for our attendees’ internet experience. A metaphor I’ve taken to using for the difference between latency and download speed is that the former is the time you wait on the onramp, and the latter is the speed limit once you’re on the road.

Results

A couple of weeks ago, the 1,100+ attendees who joined us in November got an invitation to take a post-conference survey. Of 238 responses 60.1% reported using the Free WiFi. But in the comments there are no fewer than two dozen reports of having some trouble with the service. I feel that having 2% of all attendees report problems with something is too many and we can do better. And I hear their repeated comments that they don’t want internet access limited. They want it free, everywhere, because that’s the way it should be.

The bare fact is that our organization will never be able to provide blanket WiFi coverage at our conference until the costs come down to a level we can afford. This year, we spent a little more than the vendor quoted us for registration and cyber café connections, but still less than $3,500. For that, mobile broadband provided good staff access, plus some imperfect attendee access, and we came away owning 13 hotspots.

I honestly have some doubts as to how far this approach can scale but don’t think we’ve hit the ceiling yet. For cost-effective conference internet access, mobile broadband has arrived as a feasible option.

Jason Samuels is a technology manager with experience managing projects, budgets and vendor relations. Jason is accomplished in software implementation, staff training, network administration, end user support, procedure and policy documentation. He takes pride in meeting business needs with the right technology, and at least one co-worker likes to joke that he squeezes nickels until the buffalos squeak. You can find him on twitter: @jasonsamuels

Thanks to Cary Walski (@cwalski) and Jaime Millard (@jjmillard) for proofreading and contributing edits to this blog post.