Level of WiFi Needed at Conference?
For a workshop about AI, my organization is planning on having attendees work in Claude. The hotel AV company needs to know how much extra bandwidth we need. I have no clue! I used chatGPT and Claude to generate an answer. For people who actually know about these things, does my draft to the AV team to get an estimate seem remotely correct? What is missing?
------
We are planning for approximately 100 laptops concurrently using Claude during a two-hour hands-on session.
The exercises will be primarily text- and document-based. We do not anticipate video streaming or other particularly bandwidth-intensive activities.
For planning purposes, we would like to request:
- 150 Mbps of dedicated symmetric bandwidth for the workshop room
- Capacity to support approximately 100 simultaneous laptop connections
- Estimated actual data usage of approximately 3–7 GB per hour, or roughly 15–25 GB total over the two-hour workshop
The 150 Mbps recommendation includes headroom for periods when many participants may submit prompts at the same time, as well as document uploads and downloads, web browsing, authentication, and normal background laptop traffic.
Claude itself is generally not especially bandwidth-intensive compared with video conferencing or streaming. Our greater concern is ensuring that the Wi-Fi infrastructure in the room can reliably accommodate 100 simultaneous devices without congestion or aggressive per-device throttling.
If helpful for your planning, 75 Mbps symmetric would likely be sufficient for the core Claude activity, but we would prefer 150 Mbps dedicated symmetric bandwidth to provide a comfortable margin and reduce the risk of connectivity issues during the hands-on exercises. We do not believe 200 Mbps or more is necessary unless it is advisable based on the venue's network configuration.
Please let me know if you need any additional technical information from us.