Technology

Web Summit suffers wifi connectivity issue on first day

Founder Paddy Cosgrave calls for letter-writing campaign to RDS to sort problem

Taoiseach Enda Kenny rings the bell to officially open the Nasdaq from the Web Summit at the RDS in Dublin, with Paddy Cosgrave, founder of the Web Summit, and Adam Kostyal, head of European listings at Nasdaq. Photograph: Barbara Lindberg

Pamela Newenham
Wed Nov 5 2014 - 01:01

Web Summit

founder

Paddy Cosgrave

has apologised to the thousands of attendees at the technology conference for continuing wifi problems.

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He took to the centre stage twice yesterday to apologise for connectivity issues being experienced by attending entrepreneurs, investors, start-ups and media, saying the Web Summit had paid the RDS €400,000 for wifi.

“We have been working tirelessly behind the scenes to get the wifi working; it’s incredibly disappointing,” he said.

Mr Cosgrave said he hoped that RDS chief executive Michael Duffy would take the decision to let a third party run the wifi next year.

He encouraged conference-goers to write a letter of complaint to the RDS, saying it might help Web Summit organisers take control of wifi for the 2015 event.

Campaign

“We need a letter-writing campaign, which we will start after the Web Summit, imploring the RDS to allow a third party user infrastructure like

Cisco

or

Vodafone

that have offered to run all of this for us this year, and then we might have a world class wifi experience,” Mr Cosgrave said. “I am very optimistic that letters from tens of thousands of people around the world may persuade the RDS.”

Mr Duffy said the Web Summit saw a peak of 16,741 unique devices connected at the RDS today.

He said wifi disruption was associated with firewalls servicing the network.

He added that the Web Summit was contained within a footprint of about 20,000sq m, which results in extremely high levels of user density. He also claimed the wifi disruption was just for 25 minutes. However, many of those attending continued to complain of wifi problems throughout the day.

“This is an unprecedented wifi density compared to similar European tech events,” Mr Duffy said.

“We will continue our efforts to optimise wifi connectivity in the areas of highest density and are working with the Web Summit to ensure the best possible experience in a highly demanding environment.”

Frustrated

Frustrated attendees took to Twitter (on their own data plans presumably) to complain. “No wifi and no 3G signal at Web Summit. Tweeting by SMS like it’s 2009,” Satago founder

Steve Renwick

said.

Guy Sinnott of MCD Productions tweeted: "No wifi at #WebSummit is like no bands at Longitude."

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