iQ MAGAZINE

In June 2005, nearly 80,000 people gathered for the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival, a four-day extravaganza that has rapidly become a premier event on America's music calendar. Held on a sprawling 700-acre farm near Nashville, the festival boasts multiple stages of live music and an eclectic mix of headliners, bluegrass, hip-hop, jazz, Americana, and comedy.

And while the likes of Tom Petty, Bonnie Raitt, Elvis Costello, and Beck played on stage, Cisco Systems worked behind the scenes in conjunction with Charter Communications to design, deploy, and operate one of the largest temporary wireless networks in the United States, with a coverage area of more than 5 square miles.

• The festival's producers, Superfly Productions and AC Entertainment, relied on the network for communications, scheduling, billing, shipping and receiving, ticket taking, and more.
• The press used the network to file reports and transmit massive video and audio files
• Concertgoers used designated free wireless hotspots for their laptops or the 20 computers provided by the festival promoters.

"We are always looking for ways to improve the experience for artists, vendors, and concertgoers, and the network is a key asset, because everyone can use it," says festival organizer Richard Goodstone of Superfly.

Network in a Wheat Field

"The farm is in the middle of nowhere, so everything we needed for the network had to be brought in, from the generators to the cabling," says Mike McCullough, a system engineer with Cisco who donates his time to work the festival network each year.

McCullough flew in two weeks before the event to finish up the design and deploy the network. The team used Ethernet and long-range Ethernet for the wired portions of the network that connected festival workers in 26 production trailers. And they deployed 61 Cisco wireless access points and 20 Cisco wireless bridges.

"The result was business-class Internet access for a world-class musical event," says Andy Hettinger, a Cisco senior marketing manager who also volunteers for the event.

Of course, there were occasional problems you don't ordinarily find in the business world. "We had a number of instances of cables cut when people were driving in tent stakes," McCullough says. "And sometimes the dew on the leaves reflected the wireless signal, disrupting service. But other than that, operations went smoothly."

iQ Magazine, Third Quarter 2006