[145538] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: meeting network
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Curran)
Tue Oct 11 09:14:13 2011
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From: John Curran <jcurran@istaff.org>
In-Reply-To: <04331113-3535-4022-BB60-16589EDD3257@delong.com>
Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2011 09:12:48 -0400
To: North American Network Operators' Group <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On Oct 11, 2011, at 8:22 AM, Owen DeLong wrote:
> On Oct 10, 2011, at 10:32 PM, Joel jaeggli wrote:
>> On 10/10/11 07:00 , Owen DeLong wrote:
>>=20
>>> It would be wise for NANOG to approach future venues and =
specifically
>>> discuss these things with the hotel IT departments in question ahead
>>> of time so that they have some remote chance of being prepared.
>>=20
>> The hotel IT department is the guy who runs the as400 that gets
>> reservations from corprate, and runs the POS terminals.
>>=20
>> the room-net is by-in-large run by a third party such as lodgenet.
>>=20
> In my experience, you start with the hotel IT department and they at =
least know who to talk to at LodgeNet/whoever in order to reach someone =
that can provide a useful response.
To be perfectly clear, the hotel IT department is a fine escalation =
point
once you're close the actual event, and that they will bring in others=20=
as needed. This even works if you need to pull fiber into a facility =
for=20
additional bandwidth, with the hotel IT/telecom team often getting=20
involved months in advance.
At the time of _contracting_ (more than 1 year in advance in many =
cases),
the ability to pierce the sales veil of "Yes, we can do anything you =
need"
and "It's no problem" can be quite difficult, even if one does an =
on-site
visit and meets with the hotel IT team. They are trained to avoid =
raising
any issues in the sales process, and prioritize any actual technical =
level
engagement with their partners until well past contract. They often do =
not
even have the ability to engage their partners except during an actual=20=
performance problem, so expecting them to get someone on the phone a =
year
in advance of an event to commit to an unusual configuration may be =
quite
limited (or even absent in the case of hotel chains whose wireless =
partner=20
relationship is held by the hotel chain parent corporation.)
I'm not saying that it is not worth trying; I just want folks to have a
realistic understanding of how these arrangements are actually made. It
is far better today then in the past, as there have been many =
conferences
over the years where step 1 was pulling the coax or fiber through the=20
hotel to establish their first-ever network infrastructure... :-)
FYI,
/John
