It’s 6 A.M. The kids have just started filing into the local aquatic center for a large swim meet.  In every other kids’ swim bag is a WiFi enabled cell phone, an iPod Touch with WiFi, or a netbook.  In every other swim parent’s bag is a laptop or netbook.  And there are about 700 kids at this swim meet, and at least 300 parents and spectators.  And they all start connecting to the free public WiFi at the pool as soon as the kids and parents fire them up.  And the network slows to a C-R-A-W-L.

Forget about using the free pubic WiFi for uploading meet results to the internet.  Absolutely forget about using a home router on 2.4GHz to use Windows Networking to network the computers being used to run the meet.

Some ideas we had to solve this problem:

1) Change the public WiFi password right before a large swim meet. This way, if you really need WiFi, you can get the password; otherwise, the iPod Touch in your swim bag doesn’t really need to be on the network while you are swimming!

2) Use a 5GHz draft N MIMO router to network the computers being used for the swim meet.

3) Reallocate the network bandwidth to allow for more public bandwidth during a meet.

So far, we have tried #2, and we will try #1 and #3 at the next meet!!