The wireless net here at Gnomedex is part of the Bell Harbor Convention Hall, a facility operated by the city of Seattle, and the net has run fine through many a conference. Chris Pirillo, organizer of Gnomedex did warn them, saying Gnomedexers would be creating a serious stress test of their net, so they better be ready!
And so we did. Half an hour after the conference started, with 400 attendees online with their notebooks, we used up all the IP addresses. They added more networks. Didn’t really help. The nets are mostly up but very slow. 400 normal users is one thing. 400 blogging geeks running news aggregators, uploading and downloading podcasts, checking email, etc. put a stress on a net that even this net in Seattle, the most wireless city in the country, couldn’t handle.