Now that the basestations at PyCon seem to have been sorted out, the network seems to be working. Except there are periodic instances where NetMonitor shows a metric buttload of incoming packets although I'm not doing anything to cause an incoming bandwidth spike. Furthermore, netstat isn't showing anything out of the ordinary: Rendezvous, an ssh connection and some HTTP sessions.
The culprit looks like Windows laptops with Windows Networking clients turned on. That certainly does explain the intermittent packet storms. The organizers are asking people to turn off their Windows networking clients, and it has helped somewhat. The packet storms are much less frequent today.
