Wireless LAN Professionals Conference Europe

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the first Wireless LAN Professionals Conference in Europe, happened in Maastrich.

Wireless is an important part of my job, I designed and managed more than a few wireless networks installations and I know there are many challenges involved, I felt I needed to increase my knowledge so I had pretty high expectations from this event.

ALT

The schedule included two tracks of 8 sessions each and ten "Ten Talks" in one day and a half.

There are many aspects of the event that I really liked.

It is not a vendor event

Of course vendors were present, many speakers work for a vendors. The good part is the sessions were not just presentation of products but wireless concepts, best practices, installation advices, protocol behaviour that can be applied to any vendor, 802.11 is a standard right?

The attendee bag

Every attendee of the conference receive a bag with many gadgets (AP, survey software, spectrum analyzer) that worth the price of the conference itself. That can be a strong argument for an employee to get the authorization from a manager to attend the event and in my case I use these material to study and do some test labs.

Social

Why attend an event like this in person instead of just watching the videos later? Simply because we need face-by-face conversations to share experiences, to know we're not alone fighting for a proper design and survey, technology can't replace human interactions.

Of course the event has its Twitter hastag and many discussions are very interesting but connecting a Twitter account to an actual face and voice really makes a difference to me.

Wrap up

It was great to attend WLCP and of course I'll do my best to attend again to this event. I took a lot of notes during the sessions and added many wireless professionals to my list in Twitter.

My job is not focused on wifi only so I don't expect to reach the level of expertise of other attendees but it was good to know that I did pretty well in my installations so far, that is a big motivation to keep studying CWNP.

See you next year at WLCP!