CBA Wireless Events, the networking operations part of CBA, founded by Chris Beale in 2005, has been quietly developing event-proven, mud- and rain-proof, battle-hardened wireless IT, networking and telephony services to event sites. This was the company's second year at Glastonbury - where Beale also doubled his duties as Pyramid Stage sound coordinator - delivering those services to every corner of the sprawling site that for the other 50 weeks of the year is Michael Eavis's working dairy farm.
Beale has long been an enthusiastic embracer of technological progress - including the UK's first wireless linked festival PA delay stacks at Donington Monsters of Rock in the 1990s. He comments, "It's CBA's second year at Glastonbury in an independent role. We are contracted to supply IT, networking and telephone services to the site, most of which are delivered wirelessly. We have about 200 phone handsets on desks all over the site and we supply Internet access nodes in all the significant places.
"Networking is, obviously, a fact of life: most people can't live through a day without logging on and getting their email and browsing the Internet. But people working on event productions now demand a wider concept than that, with service, security, user features and management utilities that equate to exactly what you'd expect at an enterprise level. And, even more critically, they need a bullet-proof level of reliability, whether they're in middle of a field or the middle of London."
The latter point is vital as CBA's service is capable of replacing all the former hard-wired services traditionally provided by BT on an event site, and many more, with a rock-solid wireless IT backbone which can support sophisticated services such as fully-featured enterprise-level VoIP telephony - just one phone number was all you needed to reach any Glasto production location; a CCTV network; noise management utilities; audio and video streaming, public address announcement distribution; and more.
"We're in the world of our green future," adds Beale, "and one of the things that really attracts clients is the total removal of cable. Here at Glastonbury we've removed around 20 Km of cable from what would've been needed for conventional site-wide IT and communications."
At Glastonbury, CBA was also trialling its new SPLnet networked noise level monitoring system, designed to assist production managers in ensuring the Control of Noise at Work (CNAW) Regulations are met by providing a large, easily visible digital readout of the sound level (LEQ) at any location, and the number of minutes left before anyone working in that location would exceed their safe and legal limits during their working cycle.
(Jim Evans)
