Industry working group formed to explore improving in-venue WiFi

A quick note for any WiFi equipment and service vendors and mobile operators concerned with the on-going development of in-venue WiFi. It’s a continual bugbear for everyone concerned. The users at big events want to be connected. Venues want to sell connectivity. Events organisers want to participate. Vendors want their kit to be used. Operators want to support where appropriate (and, I’d imagine, help encourage data offload).

There’s a whole community of stakeholders. Thankfully, someone’s put a steak in the ground and said, let’s fix it. Or, at least, let’s discuss it, let’s look at some ways ahead and see what can be done to make things better for everyone.

This story at Exhibition News outlines what’s going on. If you’re a vendor or operator, I strongly recommend getting in touch with the organisers. If you need an introduction, drop me a note — I’ve been doing a bit of work with the team at Reed Exhibitions.

The meeting of 28 delegates at Reed Exhibitions’ offices in Richmond follows discussions on LinkedIn that led to a meeting at the Event and Exhibiting Show in July and now a working group exploring how to improve Wi-Fi connectivity on the show floor.

“This began as a discussion on Reeds Ops LinkedIn Group and seems to have struck a chord with all parties within theindustry,” Reed Exhibitions operations director Piers Kelly said. “Technology will become an increasingly important part of exhibitions and we need to have reliable, available and cost-effective solutions to providing Wi-Fi irrespective of size of event or location.”

Just in case you think it’s a non-issue, consider this rather delicious fact from a related Exhibition News post:

According to Max Wi-Fi, the wireless provider for the recent London Art Frieze Fair, attendees transferred nearly 1TB of data during the four-day event.

(85% of devices connected during the event were iPhones and iPads!)