Yes, stress testing the capacity of the hotel network is different from testing the functionality. I suspect there are ways of doing this that don’t require occupying several hundred rooms. But there’s no need to solve all problems at once. If the IETF develops a regime for testing the functionality of the hotel networks and reporting the results in an organized fashion, I imagine there will be iterative improvements in the process over time, including clever ways of estimating the capacity. Steve On Jul 25, 2014, at 9:29 AM, John C Klensin <john-ietf@xxxxxxx> wrote: > Steve, > > I completely agree with your comment and suggestions (including > at least knowing hotel network capabilities in advance of > arrival), but note that at least some of the reason while the > hotel networks perform so badly under IETF meeting load is that > many of them are seriously underprovisioned at multiple points. > If the meetings team were to perform simple tests (that we > helped design) based on the number of people in that team, they > would be likely to get good information about capability > limitations (e.g., ports and options) but would be unlikely to > get sufficient information about performance under serious load. > Clearly, we could figure out how to run a load test, but I > assume it would take a lot of cooperation from the hotel (or > several hundred of us occupying rooms). > > best, > john > > > --On Friday, 25 July, 2014 08:09 -0400 Steve Crocker > <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> If we're going to discuss hotel networks, encryption of the >> channel is nice to have but there are more serious problems. >> >> o Many hotel networks restrict the ports that can be reached. >> This results in an absolute failure for some of us. >> >> o Many hotel networks do not support the full range of options >> for DNSSEC. >> >> o Many hotel networks have very poor bandwidth and become >> overloaded when the IETF comes to town. >> >> The meetings team does an excellent job of planning and >> running the meetings. They do extensive investigation of each >> proposed meeting site and they do a stellar job setting up and >> running the networks at each meeting. I wish they would also >> test the hotel networks in advance and report to all of us the >> limitations we're likely to encounter. And, of course, it >> would be pretty easy for a volunteer group of IETFers to >> organize a reporting effort too. > > > >