Just an interesting tidbit. I was asked to help out with the soccer game at Qualcomm Stadium last night. They had a special area on the field for the photographers and wanted to be able to have the photographers connected to the net to upload their pictures to their respective news agencies without leaving the field. Just off the tunnel that the players come out is the "media room" where we have just a little Netgear wireless router/access point for the photographers to use during Chargers games, so I just grabbed that, ran 280 ft of CAT-5 out to the field plunked down the Netgear, and set it to WPA2 encryption. I tested it thoroughly the day before the game. The next day, a few minutes after the game started, I got called down to the field because the wireless wasn't working. Everyone was associated with the SSID, but it wouldn't pass any traffic. So I power cycled it, and went back upstairs, and was called back down within minutes. With all the fans in attendance, many of them with wireless enabled smartphones, keeping track of all the wifi in the air must have been too much for the little Netgear, the thing couldn't pass traffic for more than 5 minutes between reboots.
So, plan B, went up to the media booths which weren't really being used for this game, and snagged a crusty old Cisco Aironet 1121B (yes, 802.11b) and put it in place of the Netgear on the field, even left it unsecured as I didn't have time to much about with it. Long story short, not a peep out of it the rest of the game. I had been told many years ago, that what happens is the mac table of the cheaper wifi gear gets full trying to keep track of all the mac addresses it sees flying around the air, but I haven't confirmed this. Long story short, an old crusty Aironet is better than a fancy new consumer grade AP for large events any day of the year. -M@
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