3G/Cradle Point

Does anyone who receives internet service via a 3G/Cradle Point system have any experience originating a buildling-to-building broadcast? This system has been proposed to us as an alternative until the big cable company with the national Church contract gets service in sometime in the next 60-90 days.

From what I have read, it appears the cradle point will work for normal administrative operations, but I wonder how robust it will be if we attempt to broadcast a conference, for example. Any experience or issues?

When you are using a hard-wire for ISP, it is fairly easy to limit other uses of the bandwidth in the meetinghouse. Standard procedure for webcasts is to disable wireless and any other access to the available internet bandwidth providing maximum bandwidth to the upload.

In your case, the cradle point is competing with others for cell-tower and depending where you are, you could be flopping between towers at any time. Everyone in your stake center could be asked to turn off their mobiles, but gradually, what you'll see is people turn them back on over time, each individual thinking, that just mine won't hurt... This happened to us at a Temple Groundbreaking where we twice had to interrupt and remind those in attendance that 12 other stake centers were trying to watch and if they could keep their mobile's turned off that would be nice. It was just too much talking to the same tower all concentrated in the same place to GUARANTEE the bandwidth you need.

I just know the team in SLC does not suggest doing an upload over a hotspot. Is there another meetinghouse that could be used to do the upload?

johnshaw wrote:I just know the team in SLC does not suggest doing an upload over a hotspot. Is there another meetinghouse that could be used to do the upload?

How would we get the broadcast from the stake center to the other meetinghouse, where they could upload it to the Church servers for the intended receiving building?

lajackson wrote:

johnshaw wrote:I just know the team in SLC does not suggest doing an upload over a hotspot. Is there another meetinghouse that could be used to do the upload?

How would we get the broadcast from the stake center to the other meetinghouse, where they could upload it to the Church servers for the intended receiving building?

I'm guessing that the suggestion is to consider holding the conference in another building.

What about recording it? Hey, CHQ pre-records the stake conference they beam from SLC. :rolleyes:

I realize that there are some Stake Presidencies that would be extremely uncomfortable with broadcasting from some place other than 'the Stake Center'. But if the need is there and another meetinghouse would serve better as the upload location, I'd seriously suggest moving the location.

We've had many successful downloads of a webcast over hotspots... they are much better at streaming down than up.

johnshaw wrote:We've had many successful downloads of a webcast over hotspots... they are much better at streaming down than up.

Thank you for confirming my concern. Moving would normally be a good idea, and if this were stake conference, we would consider it.

But in this case, I think it would be better to hold the meeting at the new stake center, since we are going to dedicate it. I am not sure whether to laugh or cry, so I guess I will just go and prepare my talk instead of worrying about all of these magical technical things this week.

lajackson wrote:I think it would be better to hold the meeting at the new stake center, since we are going to dedicate it.

Oy Vey. That does limit the options.

Any wireless (microwave) carriers? Otherwise you might consider an audio-only conference.

Cradle Point does allow you to have failover Wifi-as-internet as well... maybe to have some assurance you could borrow a member hotspot and set it up for load balancing. If you choose different carriers, maybe one that is GSM (like tmobile) vs CDMA (like sprint) - there is a higher chance of success. We did that for a Genealogy Conference we did last year, but it was a 'guest-wireless' for attendees of the conference, so it was limited to web browsing.