Tim Oreilly needs to figure out Router2.0

I’ve been at Tim Oreilly’s Web 2.0 Expo this week and the biggest joke is that for the hundreds of thousands of dollars he clearly spent and even more he clearly earned, the wireless SUCKED!!!

It’s pathetic that at a huge conference like this with a reported more than 10,000 people attending, everybody was having MAJOR problems with the wireless. There were rampant IP conflicts, if you were actually able to get on and get connected you frequently got booted off. It was just bizarre that at a bleeding edge conference like this people were wandering around looking for an internet connection.

Fortunately for me (and several others I saw) I had my Verizon EVDO card with me. I am utterly convinced that the most important investment for any web worker or virtual worker is an EVDO card (or the equivalent with other mobile providers). Being able to get on the internet whenever you need to is absolutely critical to those who make their living via the web. I repeatedly tried to connect to the wireless there as it would have been a bit faster than my EVDO connection, but was never able to sustain a connection for more than a few minutes. By the end of the conference I wasn’t even trying anymore, it was pure EVDO for me.

I know and understand the complications and difficulty in providing a wireless connection for 10,000 people. I get that. But, if you’re going to continually put on conferences for huge numbers of people, it would make sense to hire a team of network ninjas to build a system that would work.