The hotel uses Wi-Fi gear from Colubris Networks, which since 2008 has . The IETF attendees seemed in agreement that the problems were not caused by the Colubris equipment, but by its deployment and configuration, by an unnamed independent network integrator, who installed them. There were, they agreed, far too many access points, with radios set at high power, and poor channel planning. It was complicated, in the view of some attendees, by the hotel lacking the in-house IT resources to fix things.

But those resources did exist among the hotel's guests. Working behind the scenes, a team of IETF attendees negotiated with the hotel and were granted access to the wireless network by Sunday night. Chris Elliott, another Cisco veteran, reported to attendees by email late that night.

Reingineering on the fly

"[W]e've done a variety of configuration tests and changes," he wrote. "We believe we have improved the situation for most hotel guests. However, there may be instances where our changes (due to some holes in our understanding of where exactly some of the APs are located, for example) have made things worse in specific areas."

"This wireless network is still likely to have its issues," he warned. "I'm still seeing high latency and frequently dropped packets. It's improved, but far from perfect. It's a 2.4Ghz infrastructure in a highly 3D and rather radio transparent environment -- where the three non-overlapping channels [all that are possible in that band] are a real problem."