The argument between Verizon and AT&T over who has better 3g service is mute once thousands of users gather in one place.
Case and point, the Gwinnett Arena, when last October, thousands of smart phone users descended on the Gwinnett Arena to attend the Catalyst Conference.
You could not walk more then two feet and not see someone with an iPhone. This created a major problem, AT&T network could not handle this “hot spot” and therefore rendered all the smart phones on the AT&T network useless. 3g and cell service was obsolete and thousands of attendees yelled in horror as they could not update twitter, facebook or for that matter make a call.
Thankfully (?), most ministries do not have the technical challenge to try and manage thousands of wireless connections and mobile devices at the same time… but what you did?
Is your IT team and infrastructure prepared to host a large conference? Is that something that you considered when you created the information architecture?
Do you even care?
Perhaps one of the solutions is to simply host your conference and/or event at a location that can handle the masses but we all know that that’ll cost much more than hosting it in your own facilities.
I think one of the major issues faced when designing IT infrastructure is determining not only the maximum (not average) load now, but the maximum load several years from now.
I do know, however, that AT&T has mobile towers that they use during emergencies when the stationary towers are offline. I think that wireless carriers should set up mobile towers in the area of large events, especially when they know there is going to be a large spike in usage that could (or will) overload the existing infrastructure.
Sounds like you have thought this through matt, which is great. Can be a big challenge, but can also be something that is very manageable with the right questions.
I mean, it seems like the PR nightmare of having 10,000 unhappy customers w/ Twitter would be enough to make companies like AT&T pay attention to big events…
You would think… or maybe its the 3.4 million users that get angry with all the dropped calls.
Network capacity planning as a career and thought process is all relatively new. To be honest, most network planners I know (and I’ve done the same) guesstimate and hope that what they’ve put in place will be sufficient. However, the main problem is the data carriers are always playing catch up with the hardware manufacturers.
Take Cisco’s newly announed range of CSR routers are capable of streaming EVERY motion picture ever made in less than four (4) minutes. Now that’s raw power, but are the carriers ready for that? I doubt it.
Anyway – as far as I’m concerned, unless it’s a social media conference they shouldn’t be using their phones for tweeting, FBooking or other media based stuff anyway