Tag: Conferences

UKNOF Redux – thinking about the future, learning from the past

I said it was going to take more than one post to empty what’s in my head on this subject…

In the 24 hours since my last post on the topic, Keith Mitchell, founder of UKNOF has published two articles of his own, one on the UKNOF website, and one on his own personal Medium site (which may or may not be behind a paywall in the fullness of time).

In both articles Keith makes a special effort to thank and commend the countless individuals, seen and unseen, who helped run UKNOF over the years and make it what it was.

I am deeply grateful to Keith for acknowledging these contributions.

On my account, I’ve acknowledged, aired and feel able to move on from the feelings of bitter disappointment about what’s come to pass, and instead I’m ever closer to the “smile that it happened” state of mind.

I might continue to grieve for a little while – and in a healthy way – for the UKNOF that was, at the same time I do want to see whatever succeeds it to actually succeed.

To try and make use of the legacy left behind by 20 years (!) of UKNOF and do right by the contributors and community. To take forward the best bits of UKNOF as its foundation.

To enlighten, grow friendships, develop careers, to build networks beyond infrastructure.

So in the coming days I’ll look to the future while at the same time trying to tell some of the UKNOF story, “the best bits”, from my own perspective.

Maybe for my own peace of mind, but also maybe for the success of what’s to come.

After all, there’s 20 years of learning experiences. I was there for a lot of it…

UKNOF is dead. Long live UKNOF!

It’s going to take me a while to get my thoughts and words in order on this subject. It is one which is quite emotive for me, for reasons which will become clear. I don’t think I can get this all out, organised in a single post either. So this may be the first of several things I write on the subject.

UKIF has left the building. <thud>

The organisation that ran UKNOF events – UKIF Ltd – has stated they will no longer run the events, and will be winding the company up in 2024.

They state a number of reasons for this, including declining sponsorship in the present macro-economic climate, reduced attendance, and the costs of continuing through Covid. All of these have served to deplete the organisation’s reserves, because while the events did not cover their costs the long term commitments to venues, some made before Covid, had to be kept – UKIF would have had to pay something whether or not the events in 2023 went ahead.

Another reason is the forthcoming retirement of Keith Mitchell, the principal in UKIF Ltd and the founding convener of the UKNOF meetings, without any obvious route for succession.

Continue reading “UKNOF is dead. Long live UKNOF!”

Are venue wifi networks turning the corner?

I’m currently at the APRICOT 2013 conference in Singapore. The conference has over 700 registered attendees, and being Internet geeks (and mostly South-East Asian ones, at that), there are lots of wifi enabled devices here. To cope with the demands, the conference does not use the hotel’s own internet access.

Anyone who’s been involved with Geek industry events knows by painful experience that most venue-provided internet access solutions are totally inadequate. They can’t cope with the density of wifi clients, nor can their gateways/proxy servers/NATs cope with the amount of network state created by the network access demands created by us techies. The network disintegrates into a smouldering heap.

Therefore, the conference installs it’s own network. It brings it’s own internet access bandwidth into the hotel. Usually at least 100Mb/sec, and generally speaking, a lot more, sometimes multiple 1Gbps connections. The conference blankets the ballrooms and various meeting rooms in a super high density of access points. All this takes a lot of time and money.

According to the NOC established for the Conference, most concurrent connections to the network are over 1100, s0 about 1.6 devices per attendee. Sounds about right: everyone seems to have a combination of laptop and phone, or tablet and phone, or laptop and tablet.

One thing which impressed me was how the hotel hosting the conference has worked in harmony with the conference. Previous experience has been that some hotels and venues won’t allow installation of third party networks, and insist the event uses their own in house networks. Or even when the event brings it’s own infrastructure, the deployment isn’t the smoothest.

Sure, we’re in a nice (and not cheap!) hotel, the Shangri-La. It’s very obviously got a recently upgraded in-house wifi system, with a/b/g/n capability, using Ruckus Wireless gear. The wifi in the rooms just works. No constant re-authentication needed from day-to-day. I can wander around the hotel on a VOIP call on my iPhone, and call quality is rock solid. Handoff between the wifi base stations wasn’t noticeable. Even made VOIP calls outside by the pool. Sure, it’s a top-notch five-star hotel, but so many supposedly equivalent hotels don’t offer such a stable and speedy wifi, which makes the Shangri-La stand out in my experience.

There’s even been some anecdotal evidence that performance was better over the hotel network to certain sites, which is almost unheard of!

(This may be something to do with the APRICOT wifi being limited to allow only 24Mb connections on their 802.11-a infrastructure. Not sure why they did that?)

As the Shangri-La places aesthetics very high on the list of priorities, they weren’t at all in favour of the conference’s NOC team running cables all over the place, so their techs were happy to provide them with VLANs on the hotel’s switched infrastructure, as well as access to the structured cabling plant.

This also allowed the APRICOT NOC team to extend the conference LAN onto the hotel’s own wifi system – the conference network ID was visible in the lobby, bar and other communal areas in the hotel without having to install extra (and unsightly) access points into the public areas.

This is one of the few times I’ve seen this done and seen it actually work.

So, in the back of my mind, I’m wondering if we’re actually turning a corner, to reach a point where in-house wifi can be depended on by event managers (and hotel guests!) to such an extent they don’t need to DIY anymore?

The $16 muffin outrage!

While it’s last weeks news, it’s still making me laugh a week later, so I thought I’d blog about it…

There was outrage that the US Justice Department paid $16 a muffin (and $10 a cookie) as part of the catering for a legal conference held at a hotel near the White House.

Anyone involved in organising conferences knows that hotels want to make a certain amount of money from a conference, which you can pretty much express in this simultaneous equation:

Income = Meeting Room Hire + AV + Catering + Hotel Rooms

Thought of simplistically, the hotels income breaks down roughly as fixed costs, such as the hotel’s overheads, the cost of consumables for the event, such as coffee and food, the costs of hiring anything special in for the event (such as AV the hotel can’t provide in-house, or additional casual staff), and a chunk of profit.

So, you can end up with a situation whereby if someone doesn’t negotiate hard enough, and not enough people stay in the hotel, the coffee and muffins become very expensive.