A statistic from the Connected conference the other day caught my eye – currently Amazon processes 306 orders per second… Now I’m not suggesting that the same level of heavy processing will be required at shows and events, but it the wifi is always overloaded at events, particularly when there there are analysts blogging and tweeting and exhibitors trying to demo their cloud applications and use cloud based lead capture applications. And recently at Dreamforce the agenda app was cloud based, not native.
The peak loadings when a speaker makes a major tweet-worthy comment are huge. And when all the delegates pour out of sessions into the exhibition area and the exhibitors are hitting the network. There are parallels with sports stadia. When there is a score most of those watching will tweet or FB post about it or want to see the replay on their mobile device.
To give you an idea of the investment that some sports teams are putting in place, I heard that one baseball stadium was spending $30 million to upgrade its wifi. $30 million!! And that is a 50,000 seater stadium. So similar to a big conference,
I cannot see hotels and conference venues being prepared to invest even a fraction of that, so exhibitors need to think about native apps for lead capture and investing in dedicated lines to be able to demo their applications, and organizers need to think how to provide enough wifi to support those who need it most.