The objective of CBA Wireless Events, the networking operations part of CBA, founded by Chris Beale in 2005, is to transform communications between the myriad companies and people scattered across event sites spanning hundreds of acres - Glastonbury's Worthy Farm being a prime example.
Today, Beale says that wireless is in demand across major event sites to an unprecedented extent. "It was our second year at Glastonbury in an independent role, contracted to supply IT, networking and telephone services to the site, most of which are delivered wirelessly. We had about 200 phone handsets on desks all over the site and supplied 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 equivalent to those you'd expect at an enterprise level. And they need bullet-proof reliability, whether they're in middle of a field or the middle of London."
The service replaces all the traditional cabled services temporarily installed on an event site, and many more, with a wireless IT backbone capable of supporting sophisticated services such as fully-featured enterprise-level VoIP telephony. "You only needed one phone number to reach any Glastonbury production location," says Beale, "and our wireless network supported a CCTV network, noise management utilities, audio and video streaming, public address announcement distribution and more."
The 'green' benefit of going wireless is clear - the elimination of, in Glastonbury's case, over 20km of cable, most of which is normally unusable after the event. He adds: "To work in practice the system has to be extremely robust and reliable at an industrial level, with packaging similar to professional production equipment. Ours is packaged in waterproof, robust, battery-backed-up units to ensure protection from power supply problems and weather."
At Glastonbury, the company also trialled 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.
Beale adds: "Everybody is now picking up on the idea that by using event-specific site-wide wireless networking services as an alternative to traditional methods allows everything to happen within an event timeline without any stress or any difficulty. It gives you the best of both worlds - networking that's as good as an office based system, and no need to pull cables out of the mud afterwards."
(Jim Evans)
