[SoftwareMentor]

A regional couldn't override the official FIRST rules. There are a gazzilion reasons to allow all the teams to have a wireless network for whatever reasons (scouting, source code management, like from SVN or DARCS, making certain that your girlfriend isn't talking to a nerd from another team - YOU are the only nerd she should talk to, etc.).

There may be concerns that having 100 wireless networks may interfere with the competition. Since the robots were conrolled by RF last year, that may have been the source of the no radio rule. Certainly they knew that cell phones couldn't interfere (I don't know what frequency they were using, but it would have been a violation of law by FIRST to use anything in the cell phone bands).

Not allowing control of the robots by wireless at the competition other than on the field makes lots of sense. It would be easy to interfere with each other and thus lose control of the robots.

Spot WiFi was availble at the Peachtree last year, provided by the venue. Having one or a hundred WiFi networks won't interfere with the competition, assuming that the WiFis don't transmit on the competition frequency and they are managed properly. I can see FIRST prohibiting privat WiFis just for this reason - how can they tell that some team hasn't misconfigured their network? (Well, they could, but that would take extra effort.)

This is all useless speculation. Someone needs to post a well formulated question on the usfirst forum. And we will all need alternatives to having a private WiFi network just in case.