Beer festival (stats)

I think I can say the wifi for the beer festival worked well.

Over 15GB was downloaded, and around 1.5GB uploaded.

There were 642 distinct pieces of equipment connected over the event.

Based solely on DHCP client names it looks like:-
34% iPhone
19% Android
2% Blackberry
1% Nokia

We provided both 2.4GHz and 5GHz services, but during the event we saw very few devices using the 5GHz. My iPad2 and Mac Air were ones that did. I suspect 5GHz wifi is only in the newest devices. I found the 5GHz was much snappier to use, but that is not surprising.

We provided a password protected SSID (AAISP) as per the posters, but having realised the event was not going to swamp things we provided an un-passworded SSID called "AAISP Beer Festival" which is what most people connected to.

Coverage was based around one AP (Ruckus) in at the cider area, but covered both tents and a most of the field quite well.

In future it is sensible to operate a few APs to ensure more thorough coverage including the queue.

Our DHCP server (FB2700) worked well, but the number of clients did result in us making a few tweaks to improve the way it handled things and new s/w has been issued. We also had one hitch for a few minutes when we deployed some additional IP addresses and had not set up DNS correctly.

The whole event was run on public IPv4 addresses and public IPv6 addresses with no NAT. Google access defaulted to IPv6 as well. We confirmed iPads, iPhones and Android phones and tablets were using IPv6 with no problem.

All in all - very educational.

I hope everyone that attended liked the beer, cider, and the wifi, and had a fun weekend.


  1. Well, I did say, ruckus AP and FB2700.

    We also had two DSL routers in PPPoE mode, and a pair of 3G routers as backup. There were apple airport APs for staff in the porta-cabins as well.

  2. What Ruckus model did you use?

  3. Sorry, did I read that right, you were issuing FB2700 fixes from the beer festival due to issues being noticed while there.... dedication.. :)

  4. Fixing live code after consuming a number of ciders? Not sure whether that's dedication or suicide..

