Several days ago I attended a Wi-Co Event–what is Wi-Co? Well, if you do wireless, think of this as a mini one day event along the same lines of WLPC. Wait, What’s WLPC?

WLPC is “The Conference FOR Wireless LAN Professionals BY Wireless LAN Professionals”. It’s held twice a year, one in Phoenix, Arizona, USA and in Prague, capital city of the Czech Republic.

Wi-Co is basically the friendly neighborhood version: 50–100 people, short talks, same crowd you see at WLPC, just with fewer jet-lagged Europeans. If you wanna learn Wi-Fi without selling a kidney for a plane ticket, it’s perfect. Highly recommended.

The event was held at FedExForum—one of the largest Ubiquiti deployments publicly known. Now, like most well-designed Large Public Venues, the network was… profoundly boring. And that, my friends, is the highest compliment. Everything just worked. No drama. No screaming. No heroic last-second fixes. Just quiet, dignified competence. I nearly fell asleep from the sheer professionalism of it all–plus I had to wake up before the sun was warm and I couldn’t find any Sugar Free Red Bull. Ugh.

The one thing that actually made me sit up was the DHCP scope. According to Google, FedExForum holds about 19,000–20,000 people. Their DHCP pool? Thirteen times that. Thirteen. That’s not a scope, that’s a declaration of war on future demand. You could show up with your phone, your watch, your tablet, your laptop, your e-reader, your smart shoes, and along with a box of tacos and still get an address. 

Look, I know throwing that many IPs at something doesn’t magically make the network handle it… but why be timid? One of the talks was literally about running 100 Gig links inside the arena. I saw Access Point models that could support dual 10 Gig uplinks. These people are not playing around.

And the lesson is–If you’re looking for a reckoning, a reckoning is what you’ll find! … oh.. wait.. wrong TV show… hint-hint Westworld.

So the lesson, is simple: If you can overbuild it, overbuild it like a maniac. Design for the absolute maximum capacity you could ever possibly need… then multiply by five. Go big, or go home and explain to management why your network cried during the championship game.

And, we had lunch from Charlie Vergos’ Rendezvous—-which was just insane… the Ribs — GET THE RIBS!!!