IgniteNet‘s Metrolinq 60GHz mmwave solutions deliver reliable and fast connection for a 4-day 70.000+ participant event outside the scope of fiber network.
IgniteNet‘s MetroLinq 60GHz mmwave equipment was chosen to provide wireless connectivity during Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival. The Festival is a four-day event, held at the Great Stage Park on a 700-acre (2.8 km²) farm in Manchester, Tennessee, USA. The Bonnaroo Festival site has the same telecommunications requirements of any large metro area: voice services, life safety data transmission, individual business who need internet access for payment processing, public wifi, and finally, office buildings with their compliment of devices including access control, lap tops, printers, and handhelds. The stakes were high this year: 65.000+ guests, 4000+ supporting staff, 150+ vendor connections, 25+ media connections, and 8000+ connected devices like scanners and lights.
Every aspect of festival requires rock solid and fast network connectivity. For the last 14 years, festival promotors have chosen Yellow Dog Interactive Media, Inc. to serve as the technical producers of all aspects of the site network and for the last 2 years, Yellow Dog has chosen Ignitenet’s metrolinq product line to support network operations. “We utilize mixed media transport topology including fiber and wireless backhaul,” said Thomas Porter, president of Yellow Dog. “The ability for us to leverage the 60Ghz band with it’s speed and interference advantages has been a game changer.”
Events like the Bonnaroo Festival require temporaty setups that can be installed easily and rapidly, are interference-free, fast, reliable, and have high capacity. Pure fiber is too expensive and cumbersome to deploy, so 60 GHz equipment is a perfect solution. MetroLinq devices are very easy to deploy rapidly with minimal network planning which allows operators to rollout multi-gigabit networks on demand. All devices come with an integrated 5GHz radio which may be used as failover if the 60GHz connection is temporarily impeded due to adverse weather conditions. The innovative, tri-band radio design of the MetroLinq base-station gives operators the ultimate tool for building multi-purpose networks which integrate backhaul, fixed access as well as Wi-Fi access using the same equipment. Additionally, the MetroLinq platform is cloud-enabled, greatly simplifying configuration, monitoring, and troubleshooting of the network from any location.
MetroLinq 10G Omnis passed more than 2.5 TB of data throughout the show. The 60GHz wireless backhaul part of the network was responsible for 40%+ of the total traffic generated during Bonnaroo festival, “The MetroLinq performance was very extraordinary considering that the 60 GHz network was sitting outside the fiber-based core of the network. If a guest was using public Wi-Fi, there was a 50% probability that the traffic was going through the 60 GHz mmwave wireless backhaul,” said Thomas Porter.
IgniteNet MetroLinq equipment is field-proven to be a perfect solution for temporary setups that require high reliability, high capacity, and also simplicity when deploying the network. The products are a great fit not only for events but also for disaster recovery scenarios where mission critical data needs to be transmitted.