Cisco in partner summit Wi-Fi #FAIL

Cisco's rhetoric about getting the world connected wasn't matched by the Wi-Fi at its partner summit in Montreal, as CRN's Hannah Breeze found to her cost

By Hannah Breeze

A heavy sense of irony hung over the first day of the Cisco Partner Summit in Montreal yesterday as the Wi-Fi network spectacularly failed, leaving the thousands of delegates disconnected at a conference about how being connected will change the world. Oops.

Throughout the conference, Cisco has banged the drum for Internet of Everything, in which any "thing" - from fridges, to cars, to animals - can be connected to the internet in order to collect data which can be analysed and used by businesses.

In the past, Cisco has connected baby elephants to the internet to save them from extinction, it has worked with oil firms to use its technology to find and extract oil more efficiently than ever before, but when it comes to getting a couple of thousand people's smartphones to the internet, it is apparently flummoxed.

I will add at this point that Wi-Fi is rarely great at other tech conferences, but most other vendors will at least create separate networks for press, vendor execs, partners and so on, so there is less strain on one big network. And also in Cisco's defence, the venue we are at in Montreal is not a Cisco building and to some extent they are at the mercy of the facilities available.

I am no techie - if "turn it off and on again" doesn't work, I am stuck - but how hard can it really be for a networking company, the market leader in the WLAN market, no less, to get some working internet at an event?

In the keynote yesterday morning - when the Wi-Fi appeared to be back up and running properly - Cisco exec Bruce Klein encouraged delegates to tweet on the hashtag after there were just 3,500 tweets on it yesterday. Maybe there would have been a few more had the network actually been up and running...