Tech Forum

Yes, the STS mantra is to turn off the WiFi in order to insure the most available precious bandwidth for a streaming broadcast. For your terrifying entertainment, let me share what happened immediately after I turned off the WiFi for our stake conference broadcast yesterday.
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At 45 minutes before broadcast, WiFi off at the meetinghouse farthest away in the stake.
Immediate text from them: The WiFi just went off.
Me: Yes, I turned it off so you will be able to receive the broadcast.
Them: My laptop doesn't have an Ethernet connection.
Me: The one you were going to use for the broadcast?
Them: Yes.
Me: Go find another one. You have 43 minutes.

A leader who lived near the building went home and got his laptop.
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At 44 minutes before broadcast, WiFi off at stake center.
Immediate text from them: The WiFi just went off.
Me: Yes, I just turned it off for the broadcast.
Them: Turn it back on. I need the WiFi to set up the encoder for the broadcast.

I missed that last text. When I didn't respond, another STS, who had a laptop with a bad Ethernet card went to a clerk's office and turned the WiFi back on. They finished setting up the encoder and started the broadcast, after which the other STS again turned off the WiFi at the stake center. The person starting the broadcast had been using a tablet to load the encoder.
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I came to the realization that many laptops today just use wireless connections. And although I have an Ethernet port on my own laptop, I got to thinking that I never use it, except for streaming Church broadcasts. At home, I just hit my wireless router from my favorite location at the moment. (Well, I do recall using it one other time to program the router.)

I visited with several members who I knew had recently obtained laptops. None of them had an Ethernet connection. I began seeing a future with USB to Ethernet adapters. One more item to lose on the way to the meetinghouse.

In the past, I have turned off the WiFi about 10 minutes before the broadcast. In the far away meetinghouse, 400 members would have missed the first part of conference if I had done that this time.

End of terrifying entertainment.

I experienced a similar thing at our conference, luckily I had a spare with me that could be wired. It seems the tablet type laptops are going the wireless way. I don't know if this is good or bad, but it is frustrating.

Thanks for this. I for one am glad that I decided to use the clerk computers as my receivers. They are hardwired to the network and the video and audio is sent to the distribution system via a CAT 5E cable. I used to use RCA until we got the new distribution amplifiers from the church and now we will be running VGA from the computer to the amplifiers. Then it will be connected into the church TV distribution system.

So I don't have to worry about WiFi in my stake.

Terry

While taking my turn at the temple's recommend desk, I like to examine the tablet/laptop used there to check recommends. I noticed that it has no Ethernet port, but rather used a USB-to-Ethernet adapter. That was the first computer I had seen for the past 20 years or so that did not have an Ethernet port, but I agree that such ports are becoming obsolete, as did serial ports, parallel ports, Firewire ports, and diskette drives. Even DVD drives are vanishing.

harddrive wrote:So I don't have to worry about WiFi in my stake.

Be careful. It depends on your Internet speed. In our stake, there are times when the clerks cannot do their work because the WiFi users are taking up so much of the bandwidth. Even using the administrative computers, we would never attempt a streaming broadcast, sending or receiving, without turning off the Wifi.

lajackson, any time I do a streaming broadcast, I do turn the WiFi off. What I was referring to was the fact that none of the receiving sites are using laptops that require WiFi to receive or set up the broadcast. I am using the clerk's computers and they are hardwired into the network. Personally I'm old school and prefer the hardwired connections over wireless.

I turn the wifi off at the receiving sites and verify the computers have ethernet connections the day before. I sometimes keep it on at the stake center that morning until the broadcast is started an hour before. I really do wish we had a private wifi network we could always leave on.

We do a complete test of all broadcast and receive site equipment 2 weeks before conference. On conference morning, broadcasting (Bible videos, MoTab Choir, etc) & receiving begins at 8:30am to allow time to handle any last minute problems that may occur. Sound checks are also done periodically during this time. We also plug an old AccessPoint into the LAN so we have our own private WiFi, which we share with leaders and speakers if necessary. A 2nd STS, watching the broadcast from home, is the clearinghouse for any phone calls from receive sites experiencing problems.

Would it be possible to stop messing around with turning off wifi and put some rules in the firewalls along the lines of:

• Traffic going to the webcast servers (ie: portal.ldswebcast.org and mhw*.cloudapp.net gets Priority 1
  Traffic going to MLS servers (or other clerk related sites) gets Priority 2
  Traffic going to familysearch.org, etc gets Priority 3
  All other traffic gets Priority 4

That should take care of most of the slowdown issues and still let people use the internet during conferences.

Aaron Z

Aczlan wrote:and put some rules in the firewalls along the lines of:

I'm not up on network protocols, but I doubt if you can control the priority from the narrow end of the funnel (chapel side). You'd have to control it from the wide end (ISP side). Once the packet has arrived past the bottle neck, it's done it's damage.