Thanks to New Zealand director Peter Jackson’s multi-Oscar-winning movie series,
the tiny antipodean nation will now forever be associated with J.R.R. Tolkien’s
fantasy The Lord of the Rings.
New Zealand, however, has another, and totally unexpected, cultural export:
Christian rock music. The other land down under recently hosted Parachute
04, a veritable Woodstock of Christian music that drew 22,000 fans to the
Mystery Creek Events Centre in Hamilton and featured over 100 bands.
Like the LOTR movies, the four-day Parachute 04 event was leading edge,
technologically. Organizers lit up the entire 25 acre site as a giant cyber
café using Wi-Fi and other networking gear from sponsors Cisco, Bluesocket
and Logical CSI.
"Per capita it was the biggest Christian rock festival in the world,"
says Kurt Brandon, managing director of Kalooma
Ltd., the Auckland, New Zealand network security firm that designed and
integrated the Parachute 04 network. "Twenty-two thousand through the gate
in a country with only five million people is pretty impressive."
Kalooma and the other sponsors got involved because Brandon’s partner, Kalooma
technical director Jeff Mason, moonlights as the drummer for the Parachute band,
the festival’s host.
While organizers and sponsors hyped the fact that the site was a giant cyber
café and anybody who attended with a Wi-Fi-enabled laptop or PDA
could use it, organizers actually needed the wireless network to light up administrative,
registration and artist areas and supply backhaul for registration and other
administrative applications.
"The main registration tents were almost a mile from the administrative
blocks and the band and artist area was another mile and a bit away," Brandon
explains. "It was easier to set up the site wirelessly than to cable. In
fact, it would have been damn near impossible to run cable."
The network included 15 Cisco access points as well as repeaters positioned
anywhere there was power. Kalooma used a "road case," a transportable,
440-pound network operations center (NOC) in a box that the company had developed
for another client.
The case, which includes a Bluesocket server, Cisco switches, a full Active
Directory server, firewalls and uninterruptible power supply (UPS), was used
the week before the Parachute festival to wirelessly enable the New Zealand
Open tennis tournament.
Some festival goers camped on the site, so there was a higher proportion of
laptops in attendance than might otherwise have been the case at a music event.
About 100 fans used the network over the four days — and that without a lot
of publicity or advertising. Another 100 or so administrative personnel also
used it.
One of the innovative applications was streaming live video from the stage
over the wireless network to private intranet sites so artists and administrative
personnel could watch what was going on in their tents while working or preparing
to go on. The video feeds were actually available to fans in attendance as well,
but organizers didn’t publicize the fact.
The functionality of the Bluesocket server was crucial to the project, Brandon
says. It allowed network designers to set up multiple, and non-intersecting,
network layers to keep administrative and public traffic completely separate
and also manage bandwidth — so festival goers didn’t hog capacity needed for
administrative applications.
"The flexibility [the Bluesocket technology] gives us is second to none,"
Brandon says.
Kalooma, a network security specialist, is the New Zealand distributor for Bluesocket. The company also distributes log analysis products from LogLogic and wireless products from AirMagnet.
The firm helps clients design and implement secure wired and wireless networks.
It has about 15 significant wireless LAN installations under its belt, Brandon
says. Wi-Fi customers include the local offices of major multinational food
and real estate companies, and the largest private prep school in New Zealand,
Saint Kentigern College.
The prep school application is an interesting one. It has been written up as
a
case study by Cisco, which supplied the Wi-Fi gear. Students at the very
high-end school get a laptop as part of their tuition. The whole campus is lit
up for Wi-Fi access.
The multinational restaurant company, which has 85 users in its Auckland office,
opted for an all wireless facility — wireless mobile telephones and Wi-Fi for
data. "The only wires are for power," Brandon says.
The company justified the $500,000 cost for the Bluesocket, Logical CSI and
other hardware and Kalooma’s services to design a secure enterprise-class wireless
network on the basis of costs saved on moves, adds and changes.
"They had to move one of their departments and figured it would have cost
them $600 to $650 for each employee with a wired network and telephones,"
Brandon says. "We moved them all in about 10 minutes."
Brandon says that despite the innovative deployments it has worked on, New
Zealand generally lags about a year behind the U.S. in deploying secure WLANs
in the enterprise. Too many installations scrape by on network security that
is far less robust than what Kalooma deploys, he says.
It’s catching up now, though, and if New Zealand’s recent record in the film
industry is anything to go by, it will soon be leading the world.
