For the second year in a row I attended Wireless Lan Professionals Conference Europe, this time in Berlin .

Location

The choice of location this time was much better, last year I went to Maastrich through Brussels, most people didn’t liked it since it’s not easy to reach.

The sessions

Session quality is high, mostly vendor neutral, speakers are well prepared and willing to share their knowledge and experiences.

Last year there were more sessions splitted in two different rooms. Looks like it’s hard to find speakers in Europe. No surprise nobody from Cisco was officially presenting a session but I spotted some attending.

The bag

Last year’s attendee bag was richer, Ekahau just gave a hat but no software of wireless adapters, nothing from Metageek, an AP from Aruba (I still didn’t received it). I’m happy I’ve attended last year’s edition with more good stuff.

The overall exeperience

This was just the second edition of the event but for some reason it looked smaller, I saw a lot of enthusiasm from the attendance and most of the speakers but it was less enjoyable than last year’s.

I don’t think it’s a fault of the organizers, you can see they have passion for the topics and worked hard for the organization, maybe it’s just because Europe is not US so it’s hard to get more speakers to come. Maybe it’s a matter of european’s approach, there are less people blogging or willing to share, many are not active on Twitter. European engineers should improve on that aspect.

What I liked most? Meeting other wireless engineers. Ok, I’m not a 100% wireless engineer, I work for a system integrator and wireless is just a part of my job but on top of all the technical knowledge it was great to share experiences, meet people and learn something interesting in front of a good german beer.

Do I plan to attend again next year? (if there will be another edition in Europe)

I’m not sure. With many IT events during the year I’ll check both the bag and the speakers before the registration. the videos are recorded and available online for free so maybe it could be enough for me.

Unless they’ll do in Spain of course! ;-) /jk