When you’ve got 5,200 developers attending your latest conference and you announce the availability of beta software for them to download and start playing with immediately, how do you manage the Wi-Fi network so there won’t be issues? Somehow, Apple has managed it with this year’s WWDC.
AppleInsider is reporting on some of the magic behind Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, which is winding down at Moscone West in San Francisco. To accommodate the needs of 5,200 developers who attended the sold-out event this year, the company built a temporary network of Wi-Fi hotspots to assure that everyone would have access from most anywhere they needed it.
This year, Apple posted displays at Moscone West, showing statistic for available bandwidth as well as a heat map of active hotspots, ongoing stats of all visible Wi-Fi networks and even “an animated depiction of network performance over time.”
“The presentation of displays highlights the efforts of Apple's network engineers, who have also installed over a thousand wired Ethernet jacks in the building to enable developers in attendance to set up a very fast connection suitable for downloading the 4GB new build of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, as well as new developer builds of iOS 5 and Xcode, Apple's integrated development environment for its desktop and mobile platforms,” AppleInsider reveals.
In previous years, developers received new software builds on optical disc, a practice which Apple is clearly tossing out the window as it announced plans to sell OS X Lion to end users exclusively through the Mac App Store when it’s available in July.
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(Images courtesy of AppleInsider)
