[Nadreck]

As a poor Australian who was kept up to the very early hours of the morning for the past few days watching the coverage of the USBC I would lie to offer my congratulations to all those involved in the coverage of this event . After being used to see the poor coverage offered to most major ACBL events it was a pleasure to see a presentation that matched the quality of the bridge being played.

The bridge played, the commentators and the results service were all superb and were a tribute to this great game.

Nadreck

[Erkson]

I can't judge about all USBC matches because I only could watch some of them, but I suffered several disconnections (which never happened during the broadcast from Poland).

I would like to know if those disconnections led to a loss of information and uncomplete .lin files.

[DenisO]

I believe the USBC were at the mercy of the hotel's wireless system, which didn't prove entirely satisfactory. Certainly the broadcast lin files were incomplete in parts but Jan Martel or Kitty Cooper may say more about the connection and whether important data can/will be edited in.

However this Vugraph coverage was a huge improvement over previous USBC/ACBL events and for me the coverage of these great matches was a joy to watch, enhanced by a great team of commentators.

[Erkson]

DenisO, on Aug 30 2006, 09:24 AM, said:

I believe the USBC were at the mercy of the hotel's wireless system, which didn't prove entirely satisfactory. Certainly the broadcast lin files were incomplete in parts but Jan Martel or Kitty Cooper may say more about the connection and whether important data can/will be edited in.

However this Vugraph coverage was a huge improvement over previous USBC/ACBL events and for me the coverage of these great matches was a joy to watch, enhanced by a great team of commentators.

I do agree, Denis, and many thanks for confirmation.

[JanM]

There seemed to be two different connection problems from White Plains. On one day, the hotel's connection to the internet went down (the wireless connection in the hotel was always excellent, but the connection from hotel to internet had a problem). On other days, particularly when there were a lot of tables up, we had intermittent problems connecting to BBO, even though we could connect to other internet sites. That may have had to do with the hotel's ISP. On one day, the hotel's ISP, in its infinite wisdom, decided to block my computer from connecting to the internet, because I had been "file sharing" - they didn't bother to tell me that until I had spent an hour trying to figure out whether it was my computer's fault (Mac running VPC, so maybe different from the regular PCs we were using for Vugraph), and then called their help line, where they made me try the usual resets and restarts before finally "discovering" that they had blocked me deliberately. When I became a bit intemperate (censoring because this is a family forum), they did let me back on.

We are trying to fill in the gaps in the LIN files. Whenever the Vugraph computers were down, the operators kept records of bidding, opening lead and result. I have been adding those to the LIN files whenever I have a moment to do so (and should get most of them in this week). When things are missing, I've been asking the players, who have been very helpful about telling me what happened. I hope that we will have complete records both for Denis' wonderful "cleaned up Vugraph" site and for the Scorecards at the usbf website (or rather the satellite www.usbc2006.org). I also have most of the information from the tables that we did not cover in the Round of 16 and will get that entered as soon as I can - just bidding, opening lead and result, however.

This year was a learning experience and hopefully we'll do even better next year. If any of you know how to deal with the connection issues, I'd love to hear from you. Last year in Houston it was the hotel's internal wireless system that gave us problems, so when we determined that the White Plains hotel wireless was solid, we thought there wouldn't be a problem. I'm looking into broadband cell access, but don't know what else to try.

[mrdct]

JanM, on Aug 30 2006, 11:28 AM, said:

If any of you know how to deal with the connection issues, I'd love to hear from you. Last year in Houston it was the hotel's internal wireless system that gave us problems, so when we determined that the White Plains hotel wireless was solid, we thought there wouldn't be a problem. I'm looking into broadband cell access, but don't know what else to try.

I think I've tried just about everything for the various vugraph broadcasts that I've produced. Here are my thoughts and observations:

ADSL - via ethernet

Two venues that I've operated from (Dallas Brooks Hall and the VBA in Melbourne) had small business ADSL connections, both of which I believe at the time were 1500/256. Connected directly to the ADSL Modem/Router or via a Switch by ethernet cable I found this to be close enough to 100% reliable. The hassle factor was having long blue cables all over the place which I made up at the venue with a big box of Cat 5e and a modular crimp tool.

ADSL - via wireless

I tired this at the VBA, but I would just about always get a drop out or two during a match. I found that if you had line-of-sight to the wireless access point, it was OK but if you can't see the antenna of the wireless access point from where the playing table is, I wouldn't rely on it.

Wireless Broadband

This was what we used in Sydney for the World Youth in 2005. There were some problems, only in the evenings, when it seemed that network load on the node we were connecting to (which was about 2km away) was such that we couldn't sustain a stable connection and would get quite a few drop outs. I would be very reluctant to use this method again.

Hotel Wireless

I tried this at the Eden of the Park Hotel in Melbourne and similar to my experience with wireless at the VBA, in areas where you had a visual on the access point it was fine, but the organisers wanted the vugraph table in a particular location in the playing area that was unsighted and too far away so after doing one match where I had a couple of drop outs (albeit with reasonably quick reconnection) I used dial-up for the rest of the event.

Dial-Up

This is what I've used for the last two years in Canberra at the Australia National Open Teams. I've found it very reliable and quite OK for up to 4 computer sharing a single dial-up connection. The basic setup is Laptop A has the dial-up connection and has Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) enabled for it in Windows XP. Via ethernet, Laptop A is connected to a small switch or hub, which all the rest of Laptops are connected to. A few things to be careful about are what the maximum session time is with your ISP and whether you may get an automatic disconnection for inactivity if your ISP doesn't recognise BBO as "activity". To deal with those issues I always establish a fresh dial-up session before each match and make sure I have a web browser open that I periodically click on. Different dial-up plans will have different rules as to session limits and auto disconnections so check with your ISP as what will be most suitable. Prepaid dial-up can be a good option, as typically the prepaid connection is for a set number of hours (say 40 hours) that is ample for doing semi-final and final of most events and they generally don't have auto-disconnection for inactivity as they are happy for you to chew into the prepaid hours even if the connection is inactive.

Conclusion

Getting access to an analog telephone line is usually quite cheap and easy at all venues and provided you are using a reputable ISP, dial-up is probably the most reliable method and least succeptible to third-parties stuffing things up (such as the hotel's IT manager restarting a router or switch in the middle of a match). Accordingly, I would generally recommend dial-up unless the venue's broadband connection is affordable, reliable and wired (unless you have line-of-sight to wireless access points).

[JanM]

Thank you for that very extensive review of alternatives. Unfortunately, the problem we have with dial-up is that hotels in the US have started to charge high rates for telephone calls in excess of some relatively short period of time (typically, they start charging by the minute after the first half hour of connection). They also charge absurd amounts to "connect" a telephone in the playing area, even when we're playing in guest rooms that would normally have telephones.

Also, for security reasons, we've gone to having each table in a separate room. That's actually been reasonably easy to negotiate with hotels - they charge us something for cleaning out regular guest rooms, but give us the rooms free. It works out well for the hotels, because they have the use of their ballrooms during our tournaments, even though our players are filling a lot of hotel rooms. But this means there is *no* line of sight from one table to the next, and it's also virtually impossible to run wires from one table to another. So either we have to have a separate phone line in each room, which gets expensive, or we need some other solution.

Your comment about the connection being dropped for lack of activity because BBO isn't seen as "activity" is interesting - I know that sometimes we could get a connection back by opening a browser and going to a website. I had been wondering why that helped, maybe it relates to the activity issue.

I was hoping that wireless broadband (EVDO?) might be a solution, probably combined with an on-site wireless router (assuming such a router will work from room to room in a hotel - it does in my house, but hotels may have more metal in their walls

Anyone else with any ideas?

[uday]

I recall recently reading a review of an ethernet-over-power device by Netgear


http://www.netgear.com/Products/BridgesAcc...dExtenders.aspx


I don't know more than this.

[barmar]

I'm not sure that would work well in a hotel environment, because there are likely to be lots of separate electrical circuits.