But there comes a point ... For a number of years, I used to set up a 6-8 PC lab as a kind of help center at a conference every year.

We had hardwired internet, but as a rule, the hotels charged insane amounts to supply wifi for the attendees, so I inherited that problem. I'd set up a couple of consumer grade wifi routers, one to supply the staff/vendors, another for the attendees.

It worked ok at first but as time went on and more and more people brought computers (and cell phones and tablets) and demanded wifi, as though it was their baud-given right, I'd hear about it.

The real kiss of death came when we were in a kind of basement walkout room; we could see the outdoors, but we were surrounded by building or dirt on three sides and above.

Net: nobody's cel phones got so much as a single bar, so they were all hitting the wifi.

And unfortunately, our devices allowed for max of 255 connections (pretty standard), but provided no way to control the lease time. Once somebody connected, it seemed that they stayed connected. Forever or until the router hit the 255+ limit and simply crashed.

Which happened once an hour or more. By the end of the first day, I could have found the reset switch in the dark with one hand tied behind my back, and the other fending off five or six entitledangry attendees.

In the event, I told the conference organizer that we were either buying better routers ... NOW ... or I'd teach him where the reset button was and send the angries to him from then on. Five minutes later, we were on our way to Fry's.

In the end, all it took was setting the lease time to like 5 minutes or so, which the new routers' software allowed. No more issues.