This year at ECCC, phone reception was abysmal. And the Internet was usurious – $150 per device for the weekend, not too good when you have six people in one booth. Or $2400 for them to drop a wireless repeater in your booth. Or $3500 for them to run a dedicated line to a hotspot in your booth. Neither of these two options were attractive either.
But then again, neither is trying to use Square’s offline mode and discovering that it drops everything it’s cached when your phone runs out of juice. Which is more likely to happen when it’s trying to get signal in a crowded environment like a con. So that’s a hundred or two of card payments I’m out from today. The rest of the con is gonna be cash only, I think.
I’m probably going to do a group booth again next year. I’d like to have something in my bag to let me connect to the convention center internet and only pay once, then act as a hotspot so everyone in my booth can happily take credit cards all day. Is there a good way to do this? It’ll have to have some way of browsing the web, to log into the portal and pay their $$$. It’ll also need to run on batteries, ideally for about 8-10 hours without a recharge…
Any other suggestions for ways to get internet in the middle of ~80k people tweeting instagramming vining etc their con without spending more money than we can reliably expect to take in are welcome.
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edit. AHA, I did some digging and found MyWi which lets a jailbroken iPhone do what I am looking for. Now to get EVERYONE to bring spare USB batteries tomorrow, especially since I am a moron who left her emptied-out battery at the table…
Edit again, after the con: it turns out that Square’s offline mode DOES keep everything, it just takes a little while to show up in the recent transactions tab. And it also turned out that the convention center’s wifi is wise to my wifi-sharing tricks and refused to work, boooo. I’ll be doing ECCC2016 in Square’s offline mode unless I can hook up with like 8 other people besides my crew to split the $2400 cost of an official repeater down to almost sane levels.