Why Wi-Fi sucked at Mobile World Congress

BARCELONA, Spain (CNNMoney) -- There were dozens of Wi-Fi networks at this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. But with more than 60,000 people in attendance, the systems were so overloaded that there may as well have been one landline connection with a 56k modem.

Areas marked "free Wi-Fi here" often had no or painfully slow connections. Demonstrations from Microsoft, Google, Intel, Yahoo, Hewlett-Packard and Research In Motion, among others, became comical when the presenters were unable to connect even to their own networks.

"That's the problem with networking conventions," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt during a keynote address this week. "Everyone is on the network."

The problem is easy to understand, but the solution is much more complicated.

Mobile World Congress was a peculiar event in that most people in attendance had smart devices with the ability to connect both to 3G networks as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Many of the attendees carried two such gizmos, like a BlackBerry and an Android phone, or an iPhone and an iPad.

That's a whole lotta gadgets trying to suck down a whole lotta data. This year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which draws the same kind of uberwired crowd, had similar connectivity problems.

Cisco (CSCO, Fortune 500), which operated the free Wi-Fi network at Mobile World Congress -- and plastered that fact all over the convention -- estimated that there were 40,000 unique devices trying to connect to its network alone. Average peak usage reached about 3,200 devices managing to connect simultaneously to Cisco's 110 access points.

Though Cisco asked to install more access points, Mobile World Congress' operators limited the availability of the free network to 10% of the conference's locations. (The convention ran its own paid Wi-Fi network as well, also managed by Cisco.) That led to digital stampedes: The press room access point, designed to supply connections to 200 clients, had 700 people accessing the network.

 

Cisco provided similar Wi-Fi access at this year's Super Bowl. Despite having twice as many attendees, that event went off without a hitch.

Why? Three main differences: A small minority of the more than 100,000 fans at the stadium were accessing Wi-Fi, Cisco was able to install 1,000 access points at Cowboys Stadium, and there wasn't nearly as much interference from other networks.

In Barcelona, just in the immediate area surrounding Cisco's booth, the networking company detected 75 Wi-Fi access points. That's going to cause a lot of interference, which is part of the reason why other networks were malfunctioning as well.