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Comment by linsomniac | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of a conference, attendees were having sporadic problems with accessing the Internet and eventually I was able to capture a trace of the problem: when the main lease network filled up, it started allocating IPs from another block, but with the same gateway. I got a lease for something like 10.1.1.69/24 with a gateway address of 192.168.1.1.

I went to the support person and she offered to reset the WiFi, but I explained that she needed to escalate it because it was a configuration problem, resetting it was only a temporary solution.

(edit: PyCon 2006 IIRC, DFW)

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And? Did she escalate it and was it solved?

Don't keep us hanging!

She did, it got solved in a couple hours, once I was able to nail down the exact problem. It's hard when random attendees are only able to give reports of "it's not working", when it's something tricky like this. I think it took the better part of a day to nail the problem down, maybe longer (my memory is spotty on it).

Almost certainly no. Unlike the assertion made, she didn’t need to escalate it.

Why didn't she need to escalate it?

I can imagine the hospitality industry would not want the WiFi sporadically going down for their guests; that's not a very hospitable experience.

Companies should work out a way to incentivise low-level workers to escalate and chase up "difficult to tackle" issues. Ignoring problems rarely work long-term and it's companies best interest to know and solve issues.

WiFi is not considered that important to a hotel or conference center, especially when most people have access to the phone network.

There’s a reason why many conferences deploy their own wifi infrastructure

What about in 2006?

Even more so.

Sorry, I meant to try and nicely nudge you into the correct conclusion and you have doubled down. 2006 was before the iPhone.

You used the wifi, you didn't tether to your Nokia 6650.

Absolutely!

We went into these hotels telling them "I know you offer WiFi, but we are a tech conference, we're going to be using the WiFi harder than your normal event." They'd all say "It's fine", but they'd quickly learn it wasn't fine.

There wasn't really the option to use the cellular network for data at that time.

We eventually ended up running our own WiFi for quite a few years, because the venues consistently would just end up a smoking crater. The first year in Chicago the venue had this fancy centrally controlled wifi that was supposed to be all smart, but even after a field upgrade because the central CPU couldn't keep up, it was just a disaster.

Ended up going with a bunch of relatively inexpensive APs all set on low RF power, where the venues always wanted to have one or two APs on high power. Basically solved our problems.

She didn't need to escalate it because for her personally there was no downside to simply ignoring the matter.

And indeed, would have probably thought that people at a conference would be better being human beings and talking to each other, rather than staring into a laptop screen.

This was the conference where Ka-Ping Ye could be found huddling in the back of the room, and then a few hours later give a presentation on "look what I just did". So, I hear what you're saying, but there is also value in being on your computer in that environment.

Path of least resistance.

She offered a solution, customer refused it. She had no obligation to act further (assuming no such requirements set by company policy).

Except that our contract with the venue included that they would provide Internet access, so we were collecting these problem reports and in several cases money was withheld due to poor performance.

I did tech support for a database conference at the Adams Mark around 2000.

That was the biggest fluster cluck I've ever seen.

The hotel sabotaged the DSL line that provides Internet access until thousands of dollars in previously undisclosed fees were paid.

PyCon had a conference planning company heavily involved from fairly early on, and that ended up avoiding, to the best of my knowledge, much of that sort of thing. The contracts ended up being fairly well negotiated. But *THAT* process was quite the hair-pulling exercise.

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