It’ the third and the last day I am on BBF/VON, and I am very tired, having a good company of people hear and a lot of work, so I have to wake up at 7am and go to bed at 1am after a very intensive day.
I am here on the stand of Wi-Next because I am participating in the NAAW project.
The exhibition itself is indeed boring for a tech guy as I am, different companies presenting the same technologies in different packages. Asterisk here… Asterisk there.. Enough of funny things though, like “Our mother board is optimized for VOiP”. But anyway, I did miss the conferences because I was busy on the grounds.
We did the WIFi coverage for the exhibitors, and it’s been an valuable experience of how our project maps on such an event. First thing was the usual plank you have to walk between usability and security. We have implemented WPA/EAP-TLS authentication, which means you have to install certificate to connect, definitely we used a self-signed one, so you also have to install CA certificate too. It’s about 10 clicks if you know where to click. I have tested the procedure on 3 different laptops and it always worked fine, but as I discovered here, some manufacturers and software shippers have really different vision of the things should work. At the end, the manual I prepared was useless for some PCs and we had to help people to connect.
The second issue we had I have encountered for the first time. All the exhibitors were officially asked not to operate WiFi access points. As the peak we counted 32 access points in about 300m2 area. At that point not us and not them could operate WiFi.
After all, the most important thing was the people I’ve met here and I am really glad that Andrea, Angelo, Flavio, Giampaolo, Nicola and Valentina have been here.
P.S. I have a plane at 20pm and deadly miss my wife and son already.