Wi-Fi Overload at High-Tech Meetings

Last June, Steven Jobs of Apple asked people to turn off laptops and phones because a strained network was interfering with his presentation. Reuters photo..

Internet entrepreneurs climb on stage at technology conferences and praise a world in which everyone is perpetually connected to the Web.

But, according to Verne G. Kopytoff at nytimes.com,  down in the audience, where people are busy typing and transmitting this wisdom, getting a Wi-Fi connection is often downright impossible.

“I’ve been to 50 events where the organizer gets on stage and says, ‘It will work,’ ” said Jason Calacanis, chief executive of Mahalo, a Web search company. “It never does.”

Last month in San Francisco at the Web 2.0 Summit, where about 1,000 people heard such luminaries as Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and Eric E. Schmidt of Google talk about the digital future, the Wi-Fi slowed or stalled at times.

Earlier this year, Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, had to ask the audience at his company’s developer conference to turn off their laptops and phones after his introduction of the iPhone 4 was derailed because of an overloaded Wi-Fi network.

The problem is that Wi-Fi was never intended for large halls and thousands of people, many of them bristling with an arsenal of laptops, iPhones and iPads. Mr. Calacanis went to the extreme at the Web 2.0 Summit by bringing six devices to get online — a laptop, two smartphones and three wireless routers.

Read more here.