Interesting to hear about your thoughts and feedback on the PHP conference.

I’ve set up loads of wireless events systems over the years (including infrastructure for ISPs).

I’ll start writing my next blog post next week which will be an ‘overview’ of events WiFi – I’ve been in touch with some really good people over the event and think it would be good to just put something together on some of the pitfalls I’ve come across with setting up event WiFi.

@Joel – Thanks for the post and some interesting points.

The thing that get’s me is this: is FoWA 2009 the biggest event where people may use a lot of Wifi? I think not. Surely this is a solveable problem? Surely there are companies in London who can not only provide this service but have the packet monitoring and equipment monitory expertise to trouble shoot (& fix!) problems on the fly. Ryan must be quite rightly annoyed about this.

Interesting mix of speakers.

I’d have liked to have heard more from Kevin about the challenges Digg will be facing.

The lady from Facebook was nice but not really techy enough for this event; I’m sure that presentation goes down well at Facebook meetups though.

The marketing guy Alex gave the best presentation but, in fairness, this could have been equally delivered at FoWD (doesn’t bother me though, I’d go to both).

In general though I’d like the event to leave the last slide of presentations on for longer so we can contact details etc.

A great event and I’d recommend it attend again.

Joel

Regarding the wi-fi, it’s interesting to hear how much you spent. I was one of the organisers of the PHP UK Conference this year (http://www.phpconference.co.uk), held at Olympia Conference Centre. We spent £2,000 on our wireless access (with a bit more for the wired access for ourselves and speakers etc.), and had just under 400 people at the event (just over 300 delegates, plus speakers, exhibitors, ourselves etc.). We had a few complaints about the wi-fi (provided by Olympia’s regular connectivity partner), but generally it worked well for most people throughout the day as far as we know. Considering we had at least half as many people attending our event as yours, and it was only for a single day, I am not surprised your £2,500 essentially was nowhere near enough to work well for most people (assuming the wi-fi providers charge around the same amount). I personally could barely get any connectivity on Thursday, but it was much better on Friday, thankfully.

In a way I suspect a major part of it was actually the fault of Apple/people using their products. Their exclusivity contract with O2 for the iPhone, which was obviously a popular device at the event, would have meant that the local O2 mobile cell for the venue would have easily got full and so users would have switched from trying to use their unlimited data phone contracts to the venue wi-fi, and thus overloading the network. Thankfully that shouldn’t be an issue next year as they’ve finally started allowing other networks to sell the device.

Anyway, I’m hoping you’ll write a proper blog post about the event on Think Vitamin so we can comment on there instead of flooding craig’s blog post that was supposed to be just about the Twitter stuff.

Lastly, most negative points about the event were pretty much forgotten during the Kevin and Gary show – that was truly memorable and I cannot wait to watch the full video of the event.

Odd mix of talks, some were I agree awesome, truly inspiring and so on (the html5 stuff, the cloud, accessibility and the ranting American at the end). There was far far too much promotional filler, and to be blunt a circle-jerk going on with the core 2 or 3 (you know who you are).

It seems to be a common failing at web/techy conferences to think that if you want to talk about the so-called social web, you have to cite Digg & Twitter as the key players. Apologies in advance (please don’t sue me Mr Rose), but I’ve heard the Digg talk so many times now, I could recite it word-for-word for half the fee they charge

The WiFi was epic fail full stop. The bullshit about iPhones was plane stupid, also with failing WiFi, turn off the HelloApp junk/spamming so that at least some of us could of got through to our emails/basecamps/etc.

As event, for me though, it was awesome. Purely for the networking, which I guess at the end of the day is what it’s all about.

10 out of 10 for respect to Ryan Carson for responding here (and I assume elsewhere on the interwebs). In the spirit of Strictly Come Dancing judges (or Dancing with the Stars for the rest of the world) – You’d get a “need to try a lot harder – 6 / 10″.

Will I go next year? Unlikely.

If I can obtain some more valuable information out of the data for you – feel free to drop me a tweet or email and I’ll do what I can.

C.

Awesome that your following up on comments.

Sorry I don’t want to sound negative, it was a great show, you and your team did a fab job – I really mean that. However I guess I was just frustrated, you set such high standards, it felt like the issues at last years show were forgotten.

Nice Spotify playlist btw

Thanks for the comment and the retweet!

C

Friday restored my faith in FoWA and Carsonfied though