We’ll be at IPEXPO at Earls Court in London for the next 2 days. If you’re coming to the conference, be sure to catch our seminar on Thursday at 13:50 in the Wireless and Campus Networks Theatre.
You can also stop by to see the Meraki team at Stand B56 for a 1-on-1 demo and a free t-shirt. Check out our team in London getting ready for the show:
It doesn’t matter how large or small the conference is, it seems like they always have WiFi problems. The networks are consistently slow, frequently fail, and usually require some arcane security measure that involve weirdly-small scraps of paper and bizarre usernames.
There’s no reason for WiFi to be this frustrating!
At Meraki, we’ve had some experience setting up WiFi at large events so we know it can be done, it’s just a matter of having the right equipment and a little know-how. We’ll give you both, for free.
We’ve started a new project to loan our enterprise-grade WiFi gear to smaller tech conferences, meetups, BarCamps, WordCamps, Tweetups, whathaveyou … for free. You provide the Internet connection, and we’ll provide a rock-solid WiFi connection. All we ask in return is that if you like our products, tell your friends, and if not, let us know how we can make them better.
We’ve just gotten started with this project, but so far, meetups like SF Beta, WordCamp Boulder, and Hacks/Hackers NYC have had great experiences.
“One of the best decisions we made for our conference. Not only was the delivery and setup effortless, our network remained stable throughout the entire day. No matter your wireless needs, this experience alone tells me Meraki’s solutions are some of the best.” —WordCamp Boulder
As part of this project, we’re excited to be partnering with WordCamp.org. We’ll offer a streamlined signup process for the many BarCamp-style events that these organizations sponsor throughout the year.
If you run an event and would like to participate in our new Free Event WiFi project, we’d love it if you signed up! We’re looking for small to medium-sized events that have enough bandwidth to support that group.
If you’re interested, head on over to the signup page to learn more or take a look at our plug-and-play setup guide, or ask any questions below!
If you’ve ever attended a big conference and had trouble connecting to the wireless or found it to be slow and unreliable, you are not alone. Providing fast, reliable wireless for conferences where you have hundreds, even thousands of demanding users with multiple devices each Tweeting, downloading video and blogging can be very challenging.
Meraki, in conjunction with British Telecom, is currently providing wireless for the two-day LeWeb conference, which started today in Paris. LeWeb is an annual tech conference that brings together tech luminaries, entrepreneurs, investors, technophiles and bloggers to discuss wide-ranging topics and to network. There are over 2,000 attendees this year, all expecting reliable access to fast WiFi. This photo (courtesy of Robert Scoble) perfectly illustrates why this event would put any wireless network to the test! Check out all the iPhones and laptops (Interesting note: Over 23% of the clients on the network are Macs and 25% are iPhones, so almost half of all client devices are Apple products)! As you can see every user has more than one wireless device….
So far tweets from the conference are raving about the speed and reliability of the wireless. Here is a shot of the usage graph in Dashboard, showing peak usage of almost 100 Mbps!
This is a great example of how scalable Meraki networks are, as well as how easy and fast they are to deploy and configure. The entire network was deployed in about one workday!
Stay tuned for more updates from LeWeb….
-Posted by Greg Williams
Update, Kiren Sekar, December 15th 2009:
The conference has wrapped up but praise of the wireless keeps pouring in! Tara Hunt’s blog listed highlights from the conference. Number four made us downright delighted:
That Wifi was Flawless! Thanks goes out to the team at BT (especially Gary Shainberg who worked with Meraki to make the mesh impeccable), whose mesh network was so solid that there wasn’t a single blip the entire conference and we used only 10% of the bandwidth. As Loic points out: ” there was a 1gb line financed and paid for by LeWeb that’s why we never exceeded 10-20% of the bandwidth available”. Impressive! In fact, I could have gotten on Bit Torrent and gone crazy without causing any ruckus. Fabulous job!
Again, nice work by Gary at BT, and Rob and Mukesh from Meraki, for making this a success.