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CBA Turns Glastonbury Festival Wireless

In recent years outdoor event organisers from the Big Day out in Australia and Glastonbury Festival have enthusiastically brought the world of communications into their magical enclaves - starting with better mobile phone and onsite banking facilities for punters - but lately, and crucially, also in the unseen event production domain of wireless, site-wide communications. At Glastonbury 2008, CBA Wireless Events rolled out its latest solutions aimed at simplifying and ‘greening up' communications between the myriad companies and people scattered across hundreds of acres of Worthy Farm for the event.

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 Chris 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.

Come Glasto '08 and its kin, and most major music and sporting events today, wireless is in demand site-wide to an unprecedented extent.

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.

"But for these benefits to work in practice they have to be extremely robust, ultra reliable and industrial level, which means being packaged in a similar way to professional production equipment - the sound systems, the lighting systems - domestic wireless kit just won't work. CBA equipment is packaged in waterproof, robust, battery-backed-up units to ensure that it is protected from power issues and weather."

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.

This year the outdoor events industry has embraced CBA solutions enthusiastically, with the company contracted to music events including Glastonbury, Download Festival, the V Festivals, Reading and Leeds, Latitude, T in the Park and Radiohead's Glasgow outdoor show, while corporate events include shows for the Royal Horticultural Society.

Adds Beale: "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 office based system, and no need to pull cables out of the mud afterwards."

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CBA Turns Glastonbury Festival Wireless

In picture: Chris Beale at Glastonbury

8th July 2008

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