Wireless traffic at U.S. political conventions expected to create havoc

Event managers are preparing for a record number of wireless devices owned by delegates, politicians, aides and media to flood the airwaves. Here's how the experts plan to cope with the situation.
8/26/2008 4:00:00 AM By: Stephen Lawson

U.S. presidential nominating conventions used to be criticized as "smoke-filled rooms" because of the cigars that party politicians smoked while they decided on a candidate.

Now the delegates are toting Blackberries instead of Cohibas, and the air is thick with radio signals.

Gather about 20,000 of the most talkative people in the world in one giant room, add support staff, then invite dozens of TV broadcasters and countless radio, newspaper and online news operations, and you have a recipe for wireless havoc. Reining it in is the job of Louis Libin, a telecommunications and broadcasting engineer who has helped set up networks at conventions dating all the way back to 1988.

As he does every four years, Libin this year is working on both the Democratic National Convention beginning Aug. 25 in Denver and the Republican National Convention next month in Minneapolis. In both cities, planners have been working for nearly a year to get ready. Setting up the wired networks is mostly a matter of logistics, he said, so wirelesstakes up most of his time. Meanwhile, Libin is also CEO of unified communications vendor PhoneFusion.

"When we have to begin to take a spectrum that's already crowded and now overlay all new services on top of that, that is the big unknown," Libin said. "The wireless side is the biggest deal, because there's no script you could read from."

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