What are the Wi-Fi requirements for the app?
Hotels and Conference Centers all package their wifi/network solutions differently. The app requires working closely with the network vendor at the venue. The high level points to communicate to the venue are:
- Touchpoint apps will use much less bandwidth than the other activities your attendees will perform.
Touchpoint app bandwidth usage is lower because attendees will perform checking email, downloading attachments, and surfing the web.
Therefore venue planning requires understanding the number of attendees on site.
Venue planning also requires understanding what requirements are needed to serve attendees’ general Internet needs.
- If live polling is used, live polling requires working with the venue network provider.
Venue coordination requires understanding how many simultaneous users the venue network can support.
Venue coordination also requires estimating the peak number of simultaneous live poll users.
Venue coordination includes assurance that the simultaneous live poll users will be able to connect.
These live poll connections use very little bandwidth.
Live poll connections still need an active connection.
Details
The Touchpoint app is not anticipated to be the main user of bandwidth at a conference. Once Wi-Fi is made available to attendees, attendees will use Wi-Fi to send and receive email, browse the web, and watch videos. Attendee Wi-Fi usage is expected to typically outweigh app usage by the app.
For people downloading the app at a conference, rather than at home or at the office, iOS app download size is typically 10MB. Android app download size is typically 5MB.
When the app is first opened, an initial sync of data tends to be larger than subsequent syncs. The initial sync is still fairly small bandwidth-wise.
For a conference of 1,500 attendees, the initial sync of data would be less than 1MB. After that initial sync, the app uses caching and other technologies to minimize duplicate syncing of data. These subsequent syncs could be anywhere from 2K to 100K. The range depends on how much data changed.
In other words, subsequent syncs require small amounts of data.
For comparison purposes, the average single web page in 2015 is more than 1,600K. This comparison references Web Performance today. Therefore, a sync for the app would often be an order of magnitude or two less data than one of the attendees visiting a single web page.
If presentations are provided within the app, those presentations can be anywhere from 500K to 5MB or higher. Bandwidth planning should be based on presentation sizes. In the app, a presentation only downloads and opens in the app when the end user clicks on it.
Live Polling
Further live polling guidance applies when live polling is used or when people access presentations during sessions. The venue needs a sufficient number of “access points”. The required access points should be available per conference room, not only in common areas.
It is helpful if the hotel provides information about offered X megabytes of bandwidth. Bandwidth planning can still be problematic when only one router exists and 1,000 people’s devices try to find it at the same time.
When talking to the venue, ask about bandwidth and the number of access points supported for simultaneous usage. In experience, one business router can support 150-200 people. The number varies widely based on the devices the venue employs.
Venue planning requires ensuring enough routers are available. The required routers depend on the number of access points each router supports. The required routers also depend on the number of people expected at the event.