For startup folks at conferences, WiFi is our lifeline letting us get some work done during talks, stay posted with the buzz around the event, and gives us piece of mind that our servers aren’t destroyed when we’re distracted with networking. You don’t really notice WiFi when it works, but you sure as hell notice when it doesn’t.
It’s a big deal for conferences. At Dublin Web Summit the main stage room had no connectivity from being overloaded. Taking a taxi back to the apartment from the summit, the news soundbite on the radio was event founder Paddy Cosgrave saying that if the WiFi situation for the conference venue wasn’t fixed for next year, “We won’t be in Ireland much longer.”
With this in mind, Lithuanian startup Rotten WiFi has shared their data from all the conference events they went to around Europe, conveniently gathered through their Android and iOS app. The company calls themselves a public WiFi and 3G/4G watchdog, and crowdsources network connection data to create a forum for reliable WiFi information for others looking for their internet fix.
Here are the results from European conferences. What’s interesting to compare is the speeds to the user satisfaction – as long as it works at a decent speed, people are happy. And as the organizer of the Arctic15, thank god ours didn’t go down.
Top photo from Slush by Sami Heiskanen
