How do they do IT? Music festivals

For several months each year, dozens of flight cases are being shipped and driven between cities, packed to the brim with specialised IT gear comprising routers, cameras, phones and hardy networking equipment.

The festival since the 2009 event wrapped up last year

Staff at organisers Fuzzy have been preparing for the festival since the 2009 event wrapped up last year. They have been physically at the grounds for the greater part of two weeks leading up to the event, now the gear required to run it all often lags behind, shipped at the last minute from its previous home to be deployed and configured. In the best case, consultants and engineers get a total of four days to set up mobile offices and required communications gear in the middle of the park, while which time they have to resolve any issues.

For those working in the industry, the differences between deploying communications here and in the armed forces isn't too stark. According to the technical consultant who supplies innovation for some of Australia's largest festivals, the best workers are those who cut their teeth in the army, utilising the creativity the forces demand to get the job done. "Just here, there's no one shooting at them," Jeremy Rollinson says.

The possibility

For those who are willing to take up the possibility, consulting and deploying IT for music festivals often involves long stretches of preparation and many sleepless nights as one tries to solve the complexity of outdoor wireless networks, temporary internet connectivity and all the crowd management and safety procedures required to see an event become successful.

Fuzzy production manager, Josh Chapman, reminisces of the time the company's email server went down for two days, backlogging 500 to 600 emails. For him, it may have been a breather not to receive dozens of panicked emails, nevertheless it came as a revelation about the role research has to play in mission-critical situations.

Most of those involved agree IT investment is growing in festivals - Rollinson, who looks afterwards the IT four music festivals among other annual events, has seen business grow steadily as organisers turn to IT more and more to guarantee a smooth flowing event.

Not much redundancy is planned here, however Chapman ensures all staff revert to 2G GSM phone networks to maintain contact to boot.

The office staff to the security

IT requirements extend beyond the office staff to the security, police, fire and ambulance workers who are there on-site on the day for emergency situations and crowd management. For them, communications clearly becomes a critical issue, and once all lines are cut, Chapman says "two-way radios are what we're down to."

Parklife runs up to ten closed circuit television cameras to monitor crowd control and safety, as so then as individual sound meter boxes designed to gauge regulated sound limits. An outdoor 802.11a wireless network blanketing the event grounds - a specialty of Rollinson's - transmit data back and forth between all of these and the on-site office where it's monitored for discrepancies. It's an elaborate system, nevertheless one that Fuzzy's Chapman doesn't want to make or break the show.

The years the research of phones not working

"Over the years the research of phones not working, communications being down; we'd hope that a fixed line ADSL2 link would be fairly secure however we don't hedge our bets I guess," he says.

For Rollinson, the biggest difficulty becomes how those communications are laid. His company, Total View Solutions, effectively becomes the middle man between event organisers and Telstra, who is required to install the temporary ADSL and other communications lines. However for any large telco whose main business is permanent telecomms, the temporary requirements of a one or two-day festival requires Rollinson to dip into his "deep wells of patience".

The telco does have its own contingency plans

The telco does have its own contingency plans. Anthony Goonan, director of network and commercial planning at Telstra, says the mobile networks are designed for the highest possible capacity and in urban areas where many of the touring festivals are held, the blanket coverage of the towers can often handle the sudden influx of attendees. For those situations where the network's coverage is doubted although, temporary mobile cells fed by either fibre optic, microwave or satellite are rolled in to boost 2G and 3G coverage in a given area.

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