Here is a short note about our de-wiring the Croisette in Cannes.

For over a year, I had been operating a hotspot over one corner of the old port of Cannes. From there I was able to shoot down on the port, but not over the Palais with the legal 20dB signal. Actually, it was only really reliable for someone who had high gain on the connecting yacht…which there were only a few of at the time.

But I was able to get one high-profile CEO’s yacht connected during the Film Festival a few years ago, among others. And, they were able to grab the signal from across the bay in the newer Port Canto.

The next year the engineers for his new boat asked for more service, but couldn’t pick it up well. I came aboard and found out why. I attached a medium gain antenna to a Buffalo WiFi to Ethernet Converter and found nearly 100 signals available in the bay. Long story short, I eventually attached a yagi, pointed it at my site, found the cleanest channel and got them happy.

One of the channels that was broadcasting was a leftover from a previous project. A partner company bought rights from the city for several spots along the Croisette including the Mayor’s building, and a couple museums and hotels. We wired up the spots with antennas and repeaters from a reputable company, and got everything working using my site as the source. The big introduction was to be the GSM show. The day before everything checked out; you could walk anywhere on the Croisette and download with up to 3 Meg service (which we then clamped down so no one could take it all.)

That worked fine until about 10AM the day of the show. Then, while online downloading mail or a website with no problem, suddenly you would start getting errors and eventually, the connection would stall. Turns out that as every booth in the Palais lit up their private wifi site, as well as those set up in private sites in the hotels, solid connections became impossible. The hardware supplier couldn’t figure it out, whether it was the mesh taking the hit, or what it seemed to me; that there were just too many signals floating around in too little space. I’ve had the same thing happen in convention sites, where too many booth sites compete against the official supplier.

We rerouted the mesh to take signal from a different source, but it made no difference. In those days it wasn’t legal to put 802.11a into open air spaces, and as that was the manufacturers only solution after months of trying to work with the ‘g’ signal, we were forced to take down the system. I eventually closed my site over Cannes as well. Whether the manufacturer has found that ‘a’ solves all, I don’t know. I suspect that we are in for a lot of saturation problems when these city-wide sites get up.