I don’t want to sound flippant but honestly where you worked has somehow defied the laws of physics.

I would recommend spending 50 minutes of your life watching this: https://youtu.be/HRhZniqyey8

While many access points will state that they support 250+ clients, what they mean is that 250+ clients can theoretically be “connected” as in pinging the base station. Actual throughput will be limited.

Having worked in high density setups I simply cannot believe your experience. Even with low power and many APs there would be too much crosstalk/overlap. It cannot be the way you claim it to be unless you were 10 people and had isolation from other APs.

They just had like 100 APs and well configured roaming. I guess they carefully managed power levels and channels of each AP.

It's not much different from 4G mobile data working well at musical festivals with thousands of visitors.

IME from where I live, mobile data work well even when standing in the middle of protests of 10k people (many of them live streaming on FB and Instagram, sending selfies and photos and videos...). 100k becomes a problem though.

I'd love to see this done right, The only company I've seen go close was using ubiquity hardware and they had custom engineering work done to make it work well.

I'd -read- the shit out of the book if someone wrote it.

Same here. These corporate network engineers are wizards.

When I was a kid, my father had a small WISP. Even that (done with consumer-level hardware) was super interesting.

IMHO networking is surprisingly accessible though - it's well documented because the field is built on certifications.

> It's not much different from 4G mobile data working well at musical festivals with thousands of visitors.

I promise sincerely that this is the kind of naivity that I was referring to.

A single cell site has something like 36 "TRXs" (this is independent of 3/4g), but with 4G due to the fact there is better collision avoidance and a lot of work on the trailing and leading edges inferring meaning: you can have 36 calls without increased latency.

You will notice this.

Naivity doesn't matter when you're there and it works. Repeatedly, reliably.

It doesn’t, but it matters when you extrapolate and generalize that Wi-Fi is more than fine for most if not all the people ( even if that wasn’t you intention )

A good RF engineer who specializes in WiFi deployment can absolutely design a solid environment. For the best deployments they're involved during the building design process to identify the general area where access points will be needed based on the expected building occupancy (and just as important, how people will be distributed in the building). Near the end of construction they'll be on-site to take reading and fine-tune the placement. After construction ends they'll often be on-site several times to take additional readings and adjust power levels (although large companies may have people who can take the readings so the engineer doesn't have to come on site to make updates).

And honestly, even most conference facilities are able to provide acceptable WiFi for attendees. --I've participated in meetings where 100 people would be in one room and we all had decent connections.

WiFi has it's problems in environments where the access point owners won't cooperate (home environments), but it's much better than it used to be.

> I've never seen anyone have a problem with mobile network due to wifi

that's either due to ignorance or negligence