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The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, produced by the Anita Borg Institute and presented in partnership with ACM, is the largest gathering of women technologists in the world. Grace Hopper was one of the innovators in technology, so every year the Anita Borg’s Institute holds a conference in her name. It started off in 2010 with approximately 300 attendees of women from all over the world in the technology industry, and now this year the conference is going to be over 60,000 attendees! It is basically a career fair where some of the largest technology companies in the world, such as Google and Facebook, all exhibit at the event. It is an actual career fair now where the attendees go, and they can interview for positions at these major technology companies.

So with all the high technology attendees, and the exhibitors that are high technology people as well, the demand is for an enterprise class high density network. C3-Wireless provides exactly that for them. In previous years, they used their in-house solution at the Houston Convention center, and it failed miserably. As we have mentioned in other articles, there are several issues with using in-house solutions for such a high density environment. With in-house solutions, the Wi-Fi and network infrastructure is permanent, so wherever it already exists is where it will stay throughout every event. The problem is, every event is different, and therefore every event is set up differently, with things in different places and areas. However, the Wi-Fi infrastructure never moves, which makes it very difficult to provide consistent coverage throughout events simply because the Wi-Fi is not customized.

Another major issue with using in-house Wi-Fi and network solutions is that the venue basically just turns it on and walks away, so if there is a problem you have to call them about it, and then wait for them to send someone out to come fix it. That can take a lot of time and severely derail the event. With C3-Wireless, we send a team that proactively manages the event on site, custom designing where the Wi-Fi infrastructure should be along with any access points. During the event itself, we can be found at the help desk, and we also have technicians roaming the event making sure proactively that everything is working properly. That way, we don’t have people coming to find us, but rather we are fixing issues before they even happen, so to the end user (the attendees and exhibitors), the operation appears seamless.

That is really what makes us so successful, not only do we custom design the infrastructure and implement experts, we are also on-site throughout the entirety of the event managing it proactively. That is why we were chosen for this event; they were looking for a solution provider that could really meet the standard not only of the attendees and the number of people, but also of the type of client that is there. This will be our first year doing the Grace Hopper conference so we are very excited to be a part of it, and we expect it to be a great success so that we can return again in the years to come!