Fastpass+, a solution to "overwhelmingly negative" responses from families

[stlphil]

I still wonder if in their usage estimates they figured on one (or at most two) adults per family using a smartphone in the parks, and hadn't figured on all the kids being armed with iPod Touch's (and who in my observations are much more likely to gobble up bandwidth than adults).

 

[Buried20KLeague]

It's not their router. In fact, the traffic shaping on the routers and QoS management is part of the problem.

I've found the Wifi drops many times, not because of signal, but due to DHCP lease expiration. This means that they have QoS (Quality of Service) set so low that unless you are constantly using network signal, then you lose your connection and must reconnect.

They are doing this for a variety of reasons, but I suspect the primary one is a bottleneck at what networking geeks would call "the edge"...in other words, they are attempting to manage the amount of traffic passing between their various ISP peering relationship.

I could ramble on about this for a while, but having done some network analysis (not what I do full time, but I know enough to poke around) while I was at Pop because the Wifi frustrated me so much, that's what it appears to me.

Of course, no netadmin at Disney in their right mind would even discuss who their peering partners are, etc...but, I strongly suspect that Disney acts as their own ISP internally. So, it's all left to where they hand off to the outside world. Like I said, a simple tracert to an offsite location (like google.com or something) and then watching the IPs which report back tells you a lot.

I found a simple ipconfig /release then ipconfig /renew generally bounced my service fine, but since you can't do that easily on the iPhone / iPad, I'd have to disconnect from the wireless and reconnect...even though according to the phone, I was connected to the Wifi just fine with plenty of signal.

So...as I said, it's not their LAN (or CAN / WAN) infrastructure that is the issue, I think. It's the bottleneck they have getting to the outside world.

Now, why they don't just host mirrors of the My Disney Experience app servers inside the WAN, and then use DNS to keep you from hitting the public servers when you are on their network... <shrug>

In addition, Wifi invites for far more network traffic than traditional copper. In the sense that, while you uploading videos at night to youtube, or photos to flickr from your laptop is a common practice...imagine how many more people are doing it now, all day long, from their phones. Posting to facebook, sticking pictures on facebook / flickr, etc....list goes on.

I'm sure it will get better...but lord knows when. They were beta testing it at CBR in 2010 when I went there, and it was horrid. I was so happy to see copper back in 2011...only to have it gone again, even as an option, in 2012.

Thanks for posting this. It makes good sense.

 

[JWG]

Not the conversation I expected coming to read about FP+.

 

[The Mom]

Not the conversation I expected coming to read about FP+.

I agree. So I deleted it.

 

[Lord_Vader]

I just don't understand why they would not build a large enough infrastructure to support the existing guest load of 47,000 the people per day.

This whole NexGen experience is supposed to be entirely interactive and controlled with your mobile device, right? I'm supposed to be able to access all of the details of my vacation through this mobile device and make reservations and the whatnot with it, right? Well how the hell am I supposed to do that if I cannot access the network because it's overloaded?

The problem is that there is not enough open bandwidth on 802.11 frequencies in North America to support an extreme density of users. Every WiFi user adds a small amount of noise to the network, eventually the network is too noisy for anyone to work.

Immagine you are in a restaurant with 1000 tables, each seats four people. When you arrive it is empy and quiet and you and your party can talk as much as you want, very quietly but as it fills up you have to talk a small amount louder and louder until the entire place is full and you basically have to yell across the table. WiFi works in much the same manner with only a few channels that everyone tries to use, including all those guests with roaming WiFi networks/tethering their devices to a single mobile phone or 3G/4G device as well. As the number of users go up, so does the noise eventually reaching a saturation point where no device can communicate on the network with any consistancy.

This can partially be overcome by adding a very high density of APs (Access Points) but not very good in wide open areas such as the castle fore-court area or where you have lots of steel/concrete such as inside rides or highly themed restaurants.

 

[Lord_Vader]

It's not their router. In fact, the traffic shaping on the routers and QoS management is part of the problem.

I've found the Wifi drops many times, not because of signal, but due to DHCP lease expiration. This means that they have QoS (Quality of Service) set so low that unless you are constantly using network signal, then you lose your connection and must reconnect.

They are doing this for a variety of reasons, but I suspect the primary one is a bottleneck at what networking geeks would call "the edge"...in other words, they are attempting to manage the amount of traffic passing between their various ISP peering relationship.

I could ramble on about this for a while, but having done some network analysis (not what I do full time, but I know enough to poke around) while I was at Pop because the Wifi frustrated me so much, that's what it appears to me.

Of course, no netadmin at Disney in their right mind would even discuss who their peering partners are, etc...but, I strongly suspect that Disney acts as their own ISP internally. So, it's all left to where they hand off to the outside world. Like I said, a simple tracert to an offsite location (like google.com or something) and then watching the IPs which report back tells you a lot.

I found a simple ipconfig /release then ipconfig /renew generally bounced my service fine, but since you can't do that easily on the iPhone / iPad, I'd have to disconnect from the wireless and reconnect...even though according to the phone, I was connected to the Wifi just fine with plenty of signal.

So...as I said, it's not their LAN (or CAN / WAN) infrastructure that is the issue, I think. It's the bottleneck they have getting to the outside world.

Now, why they don't just host mirrors of the My Disney Experience app servers inside the WAN, and then use DNS to keep you from hitting the public servers when you are on their network... <shrug>

In addition, Wifi invites for far more network traffic than traditional copper. In the sense that, while you uploading videos at night to youtube, or photos to flickr from your laptop is a common practice...imagine how many more people are doing it now, all day long, from their phones. Posting to facebook, sticking pictures on facebook / flickr, etc....list goes on.

I'm sure it will get better...but lord knows when. They were beta testing it at CBR in 2010 when I went there, and it was horrid. I was so happy to see copper back in 2011...only to have it gone again, even as an option, in 2012.

Traffic shaping could be part of the problem but is typically done at ingress and/or egress points that are bottlenecks and should not affect netwoek required features like DHCP/DNS Lookup where typcial bandwidth is quite large, etc. unless they are complete idiots and I don't believe that is the case here. They may have their lease times set too short though but this is most likely because of the shear number of expected network devices expected on the network.

Disney must figure out a way to limit individual upload/download speeds for outside traffic such as iCloud, Dropbox, facebook to keep their internal network from being overloaded by users simply uploading their vacation photos and videos to the web without impacting services they are pushing us to use.

 

[flynnibus]

The problem is that there is not enough open bandwidth on 802.11 frequencies in North America to support an extreme density of users. Every WiFi user adds a small amount of noise to the network, eventually the network is too noisy for anyone to work.

That's why you do more APs and lower power - make each zone smaller.

 

[Lord_Vader]

That's why you do more APs and lower power - make each zone smaller.

Agreed, not a problem in some areas but in Disney parks they have to be hidden and cannot be blocked by to much facade/wire mesh & fiberglass which poses a problem for TDO.

 

[flynnibus]

Agreed, not a problem in some areas but in Disney parks they have to be hidden and cannot be blocked by to much facade/wire mesh & fiberglass which poses a problem for TDO.

Nothing a bit of creativity can't solve... something Disney has in spades.. oh wait.. had... maybe they can find some good contractors