Postmortem: Interop Wireless

LAS VEGAS, INTEROP 2007. The gambling, the booze and the ever-present challenge of finding a network connection. If you ever wanted the skinny on just how Wi-Fi scales, Interop provided the perfect setting. The test bed: 20,000 attendees roaming across 1 million square feet covered by 12 Wi-Fi arrays and delivering 500 concurrent users with data, voice and video services.

According to Xirrus, which provided the network, average per-client throughput was around 35 Kbps, dipping as low at 20 Kbps during off hours but peaking as high as 90 Kbps. As for security, because client isolation was turned off, one IDS/IPS vendor demonstrated that it was able to redirect all the clients' flows through its laptop. Maybe next time Interop will serve up a cocktail of 802.1X support mixed with warnings to encrypt all IP traffic.